cleverness amounting almost to genius."

Marchena died at Madrid in great poverty in 1821. A contemporary has
described him as being rather short and heavy set in figure, of great
frontal development, and vain beyond belief. He considered himself
invincible where women were concerned. He had a peculiar predilection
in the choice of animal pets and was an object of fear and curiosity
to the towns people. His forgery might have been completely successful
had he not acknowledged it himself within two or three years after the
publication of his brochure. The fragment will remain a permanent
tribute to the excellence of his scholarship, but it is his Ode to Christ
Crucified which has made him more generally known, and it is one of the
ironies of fate that caused this deformed giant of sarcasm to compose a
poem of such tender and touching piety.

Very little is known about Don Joe Antonio Gonzalez de Salas, whose
connecting passages, with the exception of one which is irrelevant, are
here included.

The learned editors of the Spanish encyclopedia naively preface their
brief sketch with the following assertion: "no tenemos noticias de su
vida." De Salas was born in 1588 and died in 1654. His edition of
Petronius was first issued in 1629 and re-issued in 1643 with a copper
plate of the Editor. The Paris edition, from which he says he supplied
certain deficiencies in the text, is unknown to bibliographers and is
supposed to be fictitious.

To distinguish the spurious passages, as a point of interest, in the
present edition, the forgeries of Nodot are printed within round
brackets, the forgery of Marchena within square brackets, and the