atire on the Pope and the Church of Rome. It
occasioned Bayle to commit a remarkable _literary blunder_, which I
shall record in its place. Of Italian conceit in those times, of which
Petrarch was the father, with his perpetual play on words and on his
_Laurel_, or his mistress _Laura_, he has himself afforded a remarkable
example. Our poet lost his mother, who died in her thirty-eighth year:
he has commemorated her death by a sonnet composed of thirty-eight
lines. He seems to have conceived that the exactness of the number was
equally natural and tender.

Are we not to class among _literary follies_ the strange researches
which writers, even of the present day, have made in _Antediluvian_
times? Forgeries of the grossest nature have been alluded to, or quoted
as authorities. A _Book of Enoch_ once attracted considerable attention;
this curious forgery has been recently translated. The Sabeans pretend
they possess a work written by _Adam_! and this work has been _recently_
appealed to in favour of a visionary theory![86] Astle gravely observes,
that "with respect to _Writings_ attributed to the _Antediluvians_, it
seems not only decent but rational to say that we know nothing
concerning them." Without alluding to living writers, Dr. Parsons, in
his erudite "Remains of Japhet," tracing the origin of the alphabetical
character, supposes that _letters_ were known to _Adam_! Some, too, have
noticed astronomical libraries in the Ark of Noah! Such historical
memorials are the deliriums of learning, or are founded on forgeries.

Hugh Broughton, a writer of controversy in the reign of James the First,
shows us, in a tedious discussion on Scripture chronology, that Rahab
was a harlot at _ten_ years of age; and enters into many grave
discussions concerning the _colour_ of Aaron's _ephod_, and the language
which _Eve_ first spoke. This writer is ridiculed in Ben Jonson's
Comedies:--he is not without rivals even in the present day!
Covarruvias, after others of his school, discovers that when male
children are born they cry out with an A, being the first vowel of the
word _Adam_, while the female infants prefer the letter E, in allusion
to _Eve_; and we may add that, by the pinch of a negligent nurse, they
may probably learn all their vowels. Of the pedantic triflings of
commentators, a controversy among the Portuguese on the works of Camoens
is not the least. Some of these profound critics, who affected great
delicacy in the laws