ch of the Etruscans, had not,
however, noticed a single fact recorded in these Etruscan antiquities.
Inghirami replied that the manuscript was the work of the secretary of
the college of the Etrurian augurs, who alone was permitted to draw his
materials from the archives, and who, it would seem, was the only scribe
who has favoured posterity with so much secret history. It was urged in
favour of the authenticity of these Etruscan monuments, that Inghirami
was so young an antiquary at the time of the discovery, that he could
not even explain them; and that when fresh researches were made on the
spot, other similar monuments were also disinterred, where evidently
they had long lain; the whole affair, however contrived, was confined to
the _Inghirami family_. One of them, half a century before, had been the
librarian of the Vatican, and to him is ascribed the honour of the
forgeries which he buried where he was sure they would be found. This,
however, is a mere conjecture! Inghirami, who published and defended
their authenticity, was not concerned in their fabrication; the design
was probably merely to raise the antiquity of Volaterra, the family
estate of the Inghirami; and for this purpose one of its learned
branches had bequeathed his posterity a collection of spurious
historical monuments, which tended to overturn all received ideas on the
first ages of history.[216]

It was probably such impostures, and those of _false decretals of_
Isidore, which were forged for the maintenance of the papal supremacy,
and for eight hundred years formed the fundamental basis of the canon
law, the discipline of the church, and even the faith of Christianity,
which led to the monstrous pyrrhonism of father Hardouin, who, with
immense erudition, had persuaded himself that, excepting the Bible and
Homer, Herodotus, Plautus, Pliny the elder, with fragments of Cicero,
Virgil, and Horace, all the remains of classical literature were
forgeries of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries! In two
dissertations he imagined that he had proved that the AEneid was not
written by Virgil, nor the Odes of Horace by that poet. Hardouin was one
of those wrong-headed men who, once having fallen into a delusion,
whatever afterwards occurs to them on their favourite subject only tends
to strengthen it. He died in his own faith! He seems not to have been
aware that by ascribing such prodigal inventions as Plutarch,
Thucydides, Livy, Tacitus, and other histor