till barrow muck truck was exposed by Mr. Paley. There are times when one is inclined to believe that Plato must have been the forger himself, as Bacon (according to the other hypothesis) was the author of Shakespeare's plays. Thus "Plato the wise, and large-browed Verulam," would be "the first of those who" forge! Next to this prodigious imposture, no doubt, the false ,Letters of Phalaris, are the most important of classical forgeries.
And these illustrate, like most literary forgeries, the extreme worthlessness of literary taste as a criterion of the authenticity of writings. For what man ever was more a man of taste than Sir William Temple, "the most accomplished writer of the age," whom Mr. Boyle never thought of without calling to mind those happy lines of Lucretius, - Quem tu, dea, tempore in omni Omnibus ornatum voluisti excellere rebus. Well, the ornate and excellent Temple held that "the Epistles of Phalaris have more race, more spirit, more force of wit and genius, than any others barrow muck truck had ever seen, either ancient or modern." So much for what Bentley calls Temple's "Nicety of Tast." The greatest of English scholars readily proved that Phalaris used (in the spirit of prophecy) an idiom which did not exist to write about matters in his time not invented, but "many centuries younger than he." So let the Nicety of Temple's Tast and its absolute failure be a warning to us when we read (if read we must) German critics who deny Homer's
claim to this or that passage, and Plato's right to half his accepted dialogues, on grounds of literary taste. And farewell, as Herodotus would have said, to the Letters of Phalaris, of Socrates, of Plato; to the Lives of Pythagoras and of Homer, and to all the other uncounted literary forgeries of the classical world, from the Sibylline prophecies to the battle of the frogs and mice. Early Christian frauds were, naturally, pious. We have the apocryphal Gospels, and the works of Dionysius the Areopagite, which were not exposed till Erasmus's time. Perhaps the most important of pious forgeries (if forgery be exactly the right word in this case) was that of 'the False Decretals., "Of a sudden," says Milman, speaking of the pontificate of Nicholas I. (ob. 867 A.D.), "Of a sudden was promulgated, unannounced, without preparation, not absolutely unquestioned, but apparently over-awing at once all doubt, a new Code, which to the former authentic documents added fifty-nine letters and decrees of the twenty oldest Popes from Clement to Melchiades, and the donation of Constantine, and in the third part
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