Note 306 — Chapter XIII

The story of Simon Du Bos and his MS. has been first told to me by Mr. Tyrell in his first volume of the Correspondence of Cicero, p. 88. That a man should have been such a scholar, and yet such a liar, and should have gone to his long account content with the feeling that he had cheated the world by a fictitious MS., when his erudition, if declared, would have given him a scholar's fame, is marvellous. Perhaps he intended to be discovered. I, for one, should not have heard of Bosius but for his lie.