138 AMERICAN LITERARY FORGERIES. 



centuries old, as perfect as thougli it were an old coin or a flint arrow- 

 head, miglit be easily predicated one would think. Of this, however, 

 we shall be able to produce an illustration. But, for our New "World 

 antiquaries at least, while their zeal is unmatched, their knowledge is 

 most frequently on a par with those of the eighteenth century critics 

 from whom Ossian, Kowley, and Richard of Cirencester, obtained so 

 undoubting a welcome ; and so this supposed exhumation of a perfect 

 manuscript saga of the twelfth century was received with the same mild 

 wonder as that with which Catcott or Barrett accepted from the Bristol 

 charity-boy, lyrics, epics, and whole dramas of an unheard-of poet of the 

 days of Henry VI. and Edward IV. In just such a happy stage of inno- 

 cent faith, Jack-and-the-Beanstalk, Tom Thumb, and all the fairies and 

 giants of the nursery, delighted our childhood. They are to be envied, 

 for whom its pleasant dreamland has not yet faded into the light of com- 

 mon day. 



An abstract is accordingly given, in the Washington Union, of the 

 contents of the new found Saga. If any one among the genuine 

 antiquaries and scholars of America, already familiar with the Anti- 

 quitates Americance, did turn to this new revelation, in the first blush 

 of its novelty, with faith in its possible genuineness, his mortification 

 must have been great to find that it only reproduced the old story, 

 already familiar to him, of Vinland, Huitramannaland, the encounter 

 with the Skraelings, the determination of latitude by observations on 

 the length of day and night, &c. The actors have new names, and the 

 scene is shifted from Mount Hope Bay to the Chesapeake ; but the 

 piece is, as a whole, only the old play under a new title. The inven- 

 tive faculty, indeed, appears to have been of the meagerest for such an 

 undertaking. With a Defoe, a Swift, or even an Edgar Allan Poe, for 

 the modern skald, the story might have proved a lasting addition to our 

 New World literature. And yet there is internal evidence enough to 

 make one suspect that the masker is, if not a fellow countryman of the 

 witty Dean of St. Patrick's, at any rate one of those American-Irish- 

 men, whose hereditary patriotism is apt to crop out at times in such 

 odd ways. 



The Saga, we are told, '' is a most remarkable story, apparently 

 written by a monk, and purports to give an historical account of the 

 explorations of the Icelanders in the new found Vinland, and in the 

 country to the south and west, called Huitramannaland Irliland 

 Mikla, or great Ireland," which is spoken of as having been long before 



