[259] 



SOME CANADIAN NOMS-DE-PLUME IDENTIFIED; 



WITH SAMPLES OF THE WRITINGS TO WHICH THEY ARE 

 APPENDED. 



!T HENRY SCADDING, D. D. 



I suppose all countries that have a literature at all, have a certaia 

 number of pseudonymous writings to shew, which have become classic, 

 so to speak ; a certain number of productions under feigned names, 

 that have acquired a repute or a notoriety beyond anything perhaps 

 that their authors had ever anticipated for them. The oldest litera- 

 tures of which we have any knowledge exhibits examples of such 

 writings. To this day we have in circulation compositions assigned 

 to Orpheus, Musseus, Homer, Hesiod, Pythagoras, which it is cei'- 

 tain those personages never penned. In like manner, in the far east 

 of Asia, the names of Confucius, Mencius, Manes, Sakyamouni, 

 Mahomet, are abused. And all this not, in every instaiice, originally 

 from a gross intention to deceive. It seems to have been an early 

 practice, everywhere perhaps, and one held to be within certain 

 limits legitimate, to give importance to compositions by attributing 

 them to great men long previously deceased. 



And then the sophists and rhetoricians, and, at later periods, the 

 disputants in the schools at universities, have now and then uninten- 

 tionally misled posterity by their declamations, in which illustrious 

 characters were personated and their style imitated. These produc- 

 tions, intended simply as exercises of subtlety and skiU, have been, 

 in the lapse of time, occasionally assigned to the authors respectively 

 mimicked, as their genuine offspring. Thus we now have a Plato and 

 a pseudo-Plato ; an Aristotle and a pseudo- Aristotle ; a Lucian and 

 a pseudo-Lucian ; a Cicero and a pseudo-Cicero. Thucydides and 

 Livy have much to answer for in this regard, having led the example 

 of putting into the mouths of their heroes formal speeches, which, 

 however worthily and truthfully conceived, were never uttered. 



In theology, sad to say, a like practice has prevailed, to such an 

 extent that the modern divine has to be very wary in regard to the 

 ■writings which he quotes as authority. For among the Fathers and 



