Mainsforth, who took in the great Sir Walter himself, the father of
all them that are skilled in ballad lore. How simple were the
artifices of these ingenious impostors, their resources how scanty;
how hand-to-mouth and improvised was their whole procedure! Times
have altered a little. Jo Smith's revelation and famed 'Golden
Bible' only carried captive the polygamous populus qui vult decipi,
reasoners a little lower than even the believers in Anglo-Israel.
The Moabite Ireland, who once gave Mr. Shapira the famous MS. of
Deuteronomy, but did not delude M. Clermont-Ganneau, was doubtless a
smart man; he was, however, a little too indolent, a little too
easily satisfied. He might have procured better and less
recognisable materials than his old "synagogue rolls;" in short, he
took rather too little trouble, and came to the wrong market. A
literary forgery ought first, perhaps, to appeal to the credulous,
and only slowly should it come, with the prestige of having already
won many believers, before the learned world. The inscriber of the
Phoenician inscriptions in Brazil (of all places) was a clever man.
His account of the voyage of Hiram to South America probably gained
some credence in Brazil, while in England it only carried captive
Mr. Day, author of 'The Prehistoric Use of Iron and Steel.' But the
Brazilians, from lack of energy, have dropped the subject, and the
Phoenician inscriptions of Brazil are less successful, after all,
than the Moabite stone, about which one begins to entertain
disagreeable doubts.

The motives of the literary forger are curiously mixed; but they
may, perhaps, be analysed roughly into piety, greed, "push," and
love of fun. Many literary forgeries have been pious frauds,
perpetrated in the interests of a church, a priesthood, or a dogma.
Then we have frauds of greed, as if, for example, a forger should