Edinburgh. A number of documents, thirty-three, were impounded as
forged to obtain for the forger the title of a Scotch Earl and
domains covering many millions of acres,--a larger area of square
miles than were included in the whole united territories of the
now dethroned Dukes of Tuscany, Parma and Modena, or all the
possessions put together of the German Electors, Margraves and
Landgraves. In such a number of legal documents executed by one
man, and that man, too, a civilian, it was almost next to an
impossibility that there should not be a good deal of bungling.
One of the blunders was the King of Scotland giving away lands and
provinces that never belonged to Scotland, for they were lands and
provinces in New England; another was the name of Archbishop
Spottiswoode as witness to a document executed by King James I. at
Whitehall on the 7th of December, 1639, whereas Archbishop
Spottiswoode had been dead eleven days, his monument in
Westminster Abbey bearing as the date of his death, the 26th of
November in that year. So the author of the Annals, who, as will
be hereafter shown, lived in the fifteenth century, could not
possibly write many books of ancient Roman History without, every
now and then doing or saying something that was attended with
dreadful fatality to his fraud; for he could not write them
without palpable blunders; and some are so clumsy as to surpass
conception what bungling can do.

IV. He makes Tacitus commit an error about the contents of the
Twelve Tables, which is really as monstrous as if we could fancy
ourselves reading in the pages of a native historian of mark,
Hume, Henry, or Lingard, some blunder, into which a schoolboy
could not fall, about the contents of Magna Charta, the Bill of
Rights, the Declaration of Rights, or any other well known English