men as Emerson, Longfellow, Agassiz, Peirce, with Hawthorne, Motley, Sumner, when within reach, and others who would be good company for them, should meet and dine together once in a while, as they did, in point of fact, every month, and as some who are still living, with other and newer members, still meet and dine. If some of them had not admired each other they would have been exceptions in the world of letters and science." But the term was known in America before the establishment of the Saturday Club. It was applied by newspaper humorists to a friendly circle self-styled the "Five of Clubs" which George S. Hillard, Henry R. Cleveland, Professor C. C. Felton, Charles Sumner, and H. W. Longfellow established at Cambridge in 1836. The point of the jest lay in the fact that as literary men they all had good chances, of which they liberally and righteously availed them. selves, to speak well of each other's books in the Reviews. After Cleveland's early death Dr. S. G. Howe, the philanthropist, became one of the club. Mutual friend, a modern substitute for common friend, which has established itself despite the protests of purist and pedagogue. Thus, Harrison, in his "Choice of Books," says, "In D'Israeli's 'Lothair' a young lady talks to the hero about their mutual ancestors. . . . One used to think that mutual friend for common friend was rather a cockneyism. . . . Mutual, as Johnson will tell us, means something reciprocal, a giving and taking. How could people have mutual ancestors, unless, indeed, their great-grandparents had exchanged husbands or wives?" The same fault was one of the many which Macaulay denounced in his review of Croker's "Boswell's Johnson" in 1831: "We find in every page words used in wrong senses, and constructions which violate the plainest rules of grammar. We have the vulgarism of mutual friend for common friend." Nevertheless, from the beginning of the seventeenth century this "vulgarism" has been forcing itself into favor. Its earliest reported appearance is in Ned Ward's " Wandering Spy," Part II., p. 56, edition of 1722 (but that, of course, is a work of no linguistic authority): At once quite banishing away Sir Walter Scott is much better authority. Writing to Messrs. Hurst, Robinson & Co., February 25, 1822, he refers to "our mutual friend Mr. James Ballantyne" (CONSTABLE: Memoirs). And at last came Dickens in 1864 and boldly took the tabooed phrase as the very title of a novel, so that now it is stamped so indelibly upon the English language that all the brooms of all the Partingtonian critics will never suffice to wash out the hallmark. Myself, That excellent man is. Charles Mathews, the comedian, was once placed in the awkward position of proposing his own health at a banquet where he doubled the parts of host and guest upon taking leave of his friends before starting for the antipodes. But his ready wit always extricated him from the most awkward positions, and with excellent humor he justified his novel position on the ground that he was naturally the fittest man to propose the toast of the evening: "I venture emphatically to affirm there is no man so well acquainted with the merits and demerits of that gifted individual as I am. I have been on the most intimate terms with him from his earliest youth. I have watched over and assisted his progress from childhood upwards, have shared in all his joys and griefs; and I am proud to have this opportunity of publicly declaring that there is not a man on earth for whom I entertain so sincere a regard and affection. Indeed, I don't think I go too far in stating that he has an equal affection for me. He has come to me for advice over and over again, under the most embarrassing circumstances; and he has always taken my advice in preference to that of any one else." Was it mere coincidence, or was the author acquainted with this poem of Heine's? They gave me advice and counsel in store, But, with all their honor and approbation, Good fellow! he got me the food I ate, His kindness and care I shall never forget; I cannot embrace him,-though other folks can,- Mystification and Imposture. The mystifier and the impostor have the same end in view,-the deluding of the public. But the former does it in a harmless, hoaxing spirit, the latter as a deliberate fraud for purposes of gain or glory. The mystifier only amuses, he piques curiosity, when he does what is disgraceful in the impostor. Let us take the Bacon-Shakespeare theory as proved. Bacon, in that light, is the greatest and most successful mystifier in literary history, Shakespeare the most contemptible impostor,-an impostor all the more degraded because the consent of the true author robbed his act of any redeeming boldness or audacity. The Shakespeare of the North,-or will the time come when we shall call him the Bacon of the North ?-the good Sir Walter, in short, found a great and altogether justifiable delight in provoking the public curiosity anent the Waverley Novels in seeking all means of throwing that curiosity off the right scent, even writing a critical review of one of the novels which distributed blame as well as praise, even denying point-blank a point-blank and impertinent interrogatory. There were wheels within wheels in the great Waverley mystification. Not only were the public for a period deceived as to the authorship of the books, but it was not till after his death that they discovered that a large number of the most striking mottoes to the chapter-heads, variously purporting to be extracts from old plays, the composition of anonymous writers, etc., were composed by Sir Walter Scott himself. Lockhart, in the "Life," vol. v. p. 145, thus explains the beginning of this practice : It was in correcting the proof-sheets of the " Antiquary" that Scott first took to equipping his chapters with mottoes of his own fabrication. On one occasion he happened to ask John Ballantyne, who was sitting by him, to hunt for a particular passage in Beaumont and Fletcher. John did as he was bid, but he did not succeed in discovering the lines. "Hang it, Johnny!" cried Scott, "I believe I can make a motto sooner than you will find one." did so accordingly; and from that hour, whenever memory failed to suggest an appropriate epigraph, he had recourse to the inexhaustible mines of "old play" or "old ballad," to which we owe some of the most exquisite verses that ever flowed from his pen. He These were gathered as "Miscellaneous and Lyrical Pieces" in the popular edition of the poems, to which Lockhart in 1841 prefixed a short notice giving the collection his imprimatur. Among them all there are none more famous than this quatrain,— Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife! One crowded hour of glorious life Is worth an age without a name, which forms the motto to the concluding chapter of "Old Mortality," and is credited to Anon. The verses have the true Scott ring in them, yet even to this day inquirers of the Notes and Queries order are continually requesting information as to whether the anonymity has ever been solved. One cannot be so certain of the morality of that German would-be imitator of Scott, G. W. Häring, who, making a wager that he could produce a novel which would be accepted as a genuine Waverley, published at Leipsic in 1824 the romance of "Walladmor" as an actual translation from Sir Walter Scott, and deceived many Continental readers into the belief of its genuineness. The scene is laid in Wales; the tale itself is crude and ill compacted,-not, indeed, without some weird attractions in parts, but mostly a clumsy imitation of incidents and characters such as the Enchanter had in his time conjured with. By a curious coincidence, Scott was then engaged on "The Betrothed," the scene of which is laid in the same part of Britain, and it was naturally supposed by him and his publishers that the unknown pretender to his name had in some way gained an inkling of this fact and used it to give the fabrication a greater air of probability. In the mock introduction to "The Betrothed" (1825) a good-humored conjecture is made that "Walladmor" was "the work of Dousterswivel, by the help of the steam-engine," though it is allowed that "there are good things in it, had the writer known anything about the country in which he laid the scene." De Quincey, however, found almost no good in the work. He had undertaken its translation for a London publisher, and realized when too late the hopelessness of the task. "Such rubbish-such 'almighty' nonsense (to speak transatlantice)-no eye has ever beheld as nine hundred and fifty, to say the very least, of these thousand pages. To translate them was perfectly out of the question; the very devils and runners of the press would have mutinied against being parties to such atrocious absurdities." He saw nothing for it, therefore, but to rewrite the whole in his own way, "and hence arose this singular result: that, without any original intention to do so, I had been gradually led by circumstances to build upon this German hoax a second and equally complete English hoax. The German Walladmor' professed to be a translation from the English of Sir Walter Scott; my 'Walladmor' professed to be a translation from the German; but, for the reason I have given, it was no more a translation from the German than the German from the English." A successful form of mystification was invented by Father Prout, the other name of the witty Irish unfrocked priest Father Francis Mahony, and successfully practised by many of his co-contributors to the early Fraser. This was to translate a well-known poem into some foreign language, and then to pass off the translation as a much earlier work and the undoubted original. In his "Rogueries of Tom Moore" Prout gravely charges that Moore's song "Go where Glory waits thee" is but "a literal and servile translation of an old French ditty which is among my papers, and which I believe to have been composed by that beautiful and interesting ladye, Françoise de Foix, Comtesse de Chateaubriand, born in 1491, and the favorite of Francis I., who soon abandoned her;" that "Lesbia hath a Beaming Eye" was stolen from "an old Latin song of my own, which I made when a boy, smitten with the charms of an Irish milkmaid ;" and so on through half a dozen of Moore's best-known poems. Here are the opening stanzas of the pretended "originals" side by side with the "translation:" CHANSON DE la Comtesse de Château- Va où la gloire t'invite; TOM MOORE'S TRANSLATION OF THIS SONG Oh, then remember me ! Autres charmes peut-être Méchant, pense à moi! IN PULCHRAM LACTIFERAM. Lux tuarum non est foris, Sed sinceri lux amoris. In explanation of the manner in which Tom Moore got hold of these origi nals, Father Prout circumstantially sets forth that the Blarney stone in his neighborhood has attracted many visitors, among whom none had been so assiduous a pilgrim as Tom Moore. "While he was engaged in his best and most unexceptionable work on the melodious ballads of his country he came regularly every summer, and did me the honor to share my humble roof repeatedly. He knows well how often he plagued me to supply him with original songs which I had picked up in France among the merry troubadours and carol-loving inhabitants of that once-happy land, and to what extent he has transferred these foreign inventions into the Irish Melodies.' Like the robber Cacus, he generally dragged the plundered cattle by the tail, so as that, moving backward into his cavern of stolen goods, the foot-tracks might not lead to detection. Some songs he would turn upside down by a figure in rhetoric called vσтεроν прóтεроν; others he would disguise in various shapes; but he would still worry me to supply him with the productions of the Gallic muse: 'For, d'ye see, old Prout,' the rogue would say, Not content with these exploits, Father Prout accomplished the truly extraordinary feat of translating the "Groves of Blarney," by Milliken, into excellent Italian, French, Latin, and Greek versions, claiming that the first three with the English were variants of the Greek, probably by Tyrtæus or Callimachus, and proving thereby the immense antiquity of the Blarney stone. This tour de force, which appears among the published "Reliques of Father Prout" under the head "A Plea for Pilgrimages," was of course an obvious jest. But his similar attempt to prove that Wolfe's "Burial of Sir John Moore" was almost a literal translation of some French stanzas written in commemoration of a Colonel de Beaumanoir who was killed at Pondicherry in 1749, while the French stanzas in their turn were almost literally translated from a German poem of the seventeenth century in honor of the Swedish general Torstenson, who fell at the siege of Dantzic,-this attempt, made in two papers contributed to volumes i. and ii. of Bentley's Miscellany, but not included in his "Reliques," has given some little trouble to scholars. In Putnam's Magazine for 1869 the two poems were republished in all apparent seriousness by Theodore Johnson, who claimed to have found them in foreign periodicals, and who made no mention of their Proutian origin. Johnson may have been a plagiaristic fakir, but his article imposed upon many contemporaneous critics, and the few who, like the Nation, scented a hoax gave Johnson the credit of being the hoaxer. Mirza Schaffy is a name well known in literature as that of the putative originator of the "Songs of Mirza Schaffy," a collection of Oriental poems published in 1850 and feigned to be a German translation from the Persian. They obtained an extraordinary popularity in Germany, and were rendered into nearly all the principal modern languages, and even into Servian and Hebrew. Then inquiries began to be made about the author. It was discovered that one Mirza Schaffy had lived not long before at Tiflis. Curious investigators even found his grave. But nobody in the East had ever heard of his poems. The little mystery, however, was soon dispelled. Friedrich Bodenstedt, who presented himself as the translator, was really the author of the songs. Yet Mirza Schaffy was no myth. "He was for a long time," says Bodenstedt, "my teacher in Tartaric and Persian, and in that capacity was not without influence on the production of these songs, of which a great part would not have been written without my residence in the East." In 1800 a Spaniard named Marchena, attached to the army of the Rhine, amused himself during the winter which he passed at Basle by composing some fragments of Petronius. These were published soon after, and, in spite of the air of pleasantry which ran through the preface and notes, the author had so well imitated the style of his model that many very accomplished scholars were deceived, and were only set right by a declaration of the truth on the part of the publisher. The success of this mystification struck the fancy of Marchena, and in 1806 he published, under his own name, a fragment of Catullus, which he pretended to have been taken from a manuscript recently unrolled at Herculaneum. But this time he was beaten with his own weapon. A professor at Jena, Eichstädt, announced in the following year that the library of that city possessed a very ancient manuscript in which were the same verses of Catullus, with some important variations. The German, under pretence of correcting some errors of the copyist, pointed out several faults in prosody committed by Marchena, and made sundry improvements upon the political allusions of the Spaniard. In 1803 a Frenchman named Vanderbourg published some charming poetry under the name of Clotilde de Surville, a female writer said to have been contemporary with Charles the Seventh of France. The editor pretended to have found the manuscript among the papers of one of her descendants, the Marquis de Surville, who was executed under the Directory. The public was at first the dupe of this deception, but the critics were not long in discovering the truth. "Independently," says Charles Nodier, "of the purity of the language, of the choice variation of the metres, of the scrupulousness of the elisions, of the alternation of the genders in the rhymes,-a sacred rule in the present day, but unknown in the time of Clotilde,-of the perfection, in short, of every verse, the true author has suffered to escape some indications of deception which it is impossible to mistake." Among these was her quotation from Lucretius, whose works had not been then discovered, and which, perhaps, did not penetrate into France until towards 1475; her mention of the seven satellites of Saturn, the first of which was observed for the first time by Huyghens in 1635, and the last by Herschel in 1789; and her translation of an ode of Sappho, the fragments of whose works were not then published. However, the poems attributed to Clotilde are full of grace and beauty. Prosper Mérimée was one of the most skilful of literary mystifiers, using his talents for amusement rather than for deliberate deception. When a mere |