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embodied, is dedicated ''To The Sovereign Majesty of God : To The Un- 

 created Eternal Wisdom : To The InelFable and Divine Love and Grace : 

 To The Origin of all Felicity : To The Substance and Existence of all 

 Visible and Invisible Beauty : To The centre and Recreation of Souls in 

 the Glorious Throne of His own Being : To whom all Benediction and 

 Enlightenment be attributed, the Wisdom, Honour, and Yirtue, and 

 eternal fount of Grace." 



Other frauds connected with those forgeries are noticed by Ticknor in 

 his ''History of Spanish Literature." "The Granada forgeries of ecclesias- 

 tical records," he tells us, " were connected with certain metallic plates, 

 sometimes called ' The Leaden Books,' which, having been prepared 

 and buried for the purpose several years before, were disinterred near 

 Granada between 1588 and 1595, and, when deciphered, seemed to offer 

 materials for establishing the great corner stone of Spanish ecclesiastical 

 history, the coming to Spain of the Apostle St. James, the patron saint 

 of the country. This gross forgery was received for authentic historjr 

 by Philip II., Philip III., and Philip lY., each of whom, in a council 

 of state, consisting of the principal personages of the kingdom, solemnly 

 adjudged it to be true. The question, however, was in due time settled 

 at Rome ; and the forged inscriptions were believed by the highest tri- 

 bunal of the Church to be false and forged, in which decision Spain 

 soon acquiesced," 



" Another fraud (he adds) was connected with this one of the 

 * Leaden Books,' whose authority it was alleged to confirm, but Avas much 

 broader and bolder in its claims and character. It consisted of a series 

 of fragments of chronicles circulated earlier in manuscript, but first 

 printed in 1610, and then represented to have come, in 1594, from the 

 monastery of Eulda, near Worms, to Eather Higuera, of Toledo, a Jesuit, 

 and a personal acquaintance of Mariana. They purported on their 

 face to have been written by Flavins Lucius Dexter, Marcus Maximus, 

 Heleca, and other primitive Christians, and contained important and 

 wholly new statements touching the early civil and ecclesiastical his- 

 tory of Spain. Thej were, no doubt, an imitation of the forgeries of 

 John of Viterbo, given to the world about a century before, as the works 

 of Berosus, and Manetho ; but the Spanish forgeries were prepared with 

 more learning, and a nicer ingenuity. Flattering fictions were fitted to 

 recognised facts, as they both rested on the same authority ; new saints 

 were given to churches that were not well provided in this department 

 of their hagiology ; a dignified origin was given to noble families that 

 had before been unable to boast of their founders ; and a multitude of 

 Christian conquests and achievements were hinted at, or recorded, that 

 gratified the pride of the whole nation, the more because they had never 

 till then been heard of. Few doubted what it was so agreeable to all 

 to believe. Sandoval, Tamayo de Yargas, Lorenzo Ramirez de Prado, 

 and for a time Mcholas Antonio — aU learned men — were persuaded that 

 these summaries of chronicles, or chronicones, as they were called, were 

 authentic ; and if Arias Montano^ the editor of the Polyglott ; Mariana, 

 the historian ; and Antonio Augustin, the cautious and critical friend of 



