human."

In that age some men had such an enthusiastic predilection to
antiquity that they were animated by an ardent zeal for collecting
ancient manuscripts, medals, inscriptions, statues, monumental
fragments, and other ancient and classical remains. Others, again,
were suspected of the intention to impose their own productions on
the public as works of antiquity; one man, who never ceased to
regret that it had not been his lot to live in the days of Roman
splendour, Peter of Calabria, styled himself in his Commentaries
on Virgil, Julius Pomponius Sabinus, and in his notes to
Columella, Julius Pomponius Fortunatus, his object in both
instances being that he should be mistaken for some Roman who had
flourished in the purest ages of Latinity; and Foy-Vaillant, the
celebrated numismatist of the seventeenth century, actually places
him, in one of his numismatical works, in the list of ancient
authors, while Justus Lipsius and Pithaeus both took him to have
been a "Grammaticus", or "writer in Latin," of the earlier middle
ages, all the time that he was an Italian academician, who
flourished in the fifteenth century, having been born in 1425 at a
place that has been called "The Garden of Almond Trees,"--
Amendolara, in Upper Calabria.

It would be idle to suppose that the author of the Annals was
actuated by the simple purpose of Peter of Calabria; there is
ground for believing that some deeper, and less pure, motive
instigated him to commit forgery. Though no Peter of Calabria, he
was a matured Fabio Orsini; and the only drawback from his
fabricated work is that it is not to be looked upon as Roman
history, always in the most reliable shape, but rather as a form