on him a collar of the order of the Saint Esprit; but which order was not instituted till several years afterwards by Henry III. A similar voluntary blunder is that of Surita, in his Annales de la Corona de Aragon. This writer represents, in the battles he describes, many persons who were not present; and this, merely to confer honour on some particular families.

A book was written in praise of Ciampini by Ferdinand Fabiani, who, quoting a French narrative of travels in Italy, took for the name of the author the following words, found at the end of the title-page, Enrichi de deux Listes; that is, "Enriched with two Lists :" on this he observes, "that Mr. Enriched with two lists has not failed to do that justice to Ciampini which he merited." The abridgers of Gesner's Bibliotheca ascribe the romance of Amadis to one Acuerdo Olvido; Remembrance, Oblivion. Not knowing that these two words, placed on the title-page of the French version of that book, formed the translator's Spanish motto!

D'Aquin, the French king's physician, in his Memoir on the Preparation of Bark, takes Mantissa, which is the title of the Appendix to the History of Plants by Johnstone, for the name of an author, and who, he says, is so extremely rare, that he only knows him by name.

Lord Bolingbroke imagined, that in those famous verses, beginning with Excudent alii, &c.

VOL. II.

E

Virgil attributed to the Romans the glory of having surpassed the Greeks in historical composition: according to his idea, those Roman historians whom Virgil preferred to the Grecians were Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus. But Virgil died before Livy had written his history, or Tacitus was born.

An honest friar, who compiled a church history, has placed in the class of ecclesiastical writers, Guarini, the Italian poet; this arose from a most risible blunder: on the faith of the title of his celebrated amorous pastoral, Il Pastor fido, "The Faithful Shepherd," our good father imagined that the character of a curate, vicar, or bishop, was represented in this work.

A blunder has been recorded of the monks in the dark ages, which was likely enough to happen when their ignorance was so dense. A rector of a parish going to law with his parishioners about paving the church, quoted this authority from St. Peter-Paveant illi, non paveam ego; which he construed, They are to pave the church, not I. This was allowed to be good law by a judge, himself an ecclesiastic too!

One of the grossest literary blunders of modern times is that of the late Gilbert Wakefield, in his edition of Pope. He there takes the well known Song by a Person of Quality," which is a piece of ridicule on the glittering tuneful nonsense of certain poets, as a serious composition. In a

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most copious commentary, he fatigues himself to prove that every line seems unconnected with its brothers, and that the whole reflects disgrace on its author, &c. A circumstance which too evidently shows how necessary the knowledge of modern literary history is to a modern commentator, and that those who are profound in verbal Greek are not the best critics on English writers.

Prosper Marchand has recorded a pleasant mistake of Abbé Bizot, the author of the medallic history of Holland. Having met with a medal, struck when Philip II. set forth his invincible Armada, on which was represented the King of Spain, the Emperor, the Pope, Electors, Cardinals, &c. with their eyes covered with a bandage, and bearing for inscription this fine verse of Lucretius:

O cæcas hominum mentes! O pectora cæca !

prepossessed with the false prejudice, that a nation persecuted by the pope and his adherents could not represent them without some insult, he did not examine with sufficient care the ends of the bandages which covered the eyes and waved about the heads of the personages represented on this medal; he rashly took them for asses cars, and as such they are engraved !

Mabillon has preserved a curious literary blun der of some pious Spaniards, who applied to the

Pope for consecrating a day in honour of Saint Viar. His holiness, in the voluminous catalogue of his saints, was ignorant of this one. The only proof brought forwards for his existence was this inscription:

S. VIAR.

An antiquary, however, hindered one more festival in the Catholic calendar, by convincing them that these letters were only the remains of an inscription erected for an ancient surveyor of the roads; and he read their saintship thus:

PRÆFECTUS VIARUM.

Maffei, in his comparison between Medals and Inscriptions, detects a literary blunder in Spon, who, meeting with this inscription,

Maxime VI. Consule.

takes the letters VI for numerals, which occasions a strange anachronism. They are only contractions of Viro Illustri-VI.

As absurd a blunder was this of D Stukeley on the coins of Carausius; finding a battered one with a defaced inscription of

FORTVNA Avg.

he read it

ORIVNA Avg.

in

And sagaciously interpreting this to be the wife of Carausius, makes a new personage start up history; he contrives even to give some theoretical Memoirs of the August Oriuna!

In the Valeriana we find, that it was the opinion of Father Sirmond, that St. Ursula and her eleven thousand Virgins were all created out of a blunder. In some ancient Ms. they found St. Ursula et Undecimilla V. M. meaning St. Ursula and Undecimilla, Virgin Martyrs; imagining that Undecimilla with the V. and M. which followed was an abbreviation for Undecem Millia Martyrum Virginum, made out of Two Virgins the whole Eleven Thousand!

Pope, in a note on Measure for Measure, informs us, that its story was taken from Cinthio's Novels, Dec. 8. Nov. 5. That is, Decade 8, Novel 5. The critical Warburton, in his edition of Shakespeare (as the author of Canons of Cricism observes) puts the words in full length thus, December 8, November 5.

Voltaire has given in his Philosophical Dictionary, article Abus des Mots, a literary anecdote of a singular nature; a complete quid pro quo. When the fragments of Petronius made a great noise in the literary world, Meibomius, an erudit of Lubeck, read in a letter from another learned scholar of Bologna, "We have here an entire Petronius; I saw it with mine own eyes, and with admiration." Meibomius in post-haste