Alessandro, Count, the arch-impostor of modern times, was born at Palermo in 1743. Joseph Balsamo—for such was the count's real name—gave early indications of those talents which afterwards gained for him so wide a notoriety. He received the rudiments of his education at the convent of Cartagirone; where, being employed to read to the monks during dinner, he scandalized the good fathers by repeating the names and detailing the adventures of the most notoriously profligate females of his native town. For these and similar misdeeds he was expelled from the convent and disowned by his relations. He now signalized himself by the ingenuity with which he contrived to perpetrate his crimes without exposing himself to the risk of detection. He began by forging tickets for the theatres, then he forged a will; he next robbed his own uncle, and ultimately committed a murder. For this latter offence he was imprisoned and brought to trial, but through a defect in the evidence escaped with his life. On his release he engaged a goldsmith, by name Marano, to assist him in searching for a hidden treasure; the said Marano paying 60 ounces of gold in advance to defray expenses. On arriving at the cave, where Joseph declared the treasure to be, six devils prepared beforehand rushed out upon the goldsmith, beat him soundly, and left him insensible. Dreading the vengeance of Marano, Balsamo quitted Sicily, and visited in succession Greece, Egypt, Arabia, Persia, Rhodes (where he took lessons in alchemy and the cognate sciences from the Greek Althotas), Malta, Naples, Rome, and Venice. At Rome he married a beautiful but unprincipled woman, with whom he travelled under a variety of names through the various countries of Europe. It is unnecessary to recount the various infamous means which he employed to support himself during his travels. At Strasbourg he reaped an abundant harvest by professing the art of making old people young; in which pretension he was seconded by his wife, who, though only twenty years of age, declared that she was sixty, and that she had a son a veteran in the Dutch service. In Paris he was implicated in the affair of the diamond necklace; and though he escaped conviction by the matchless impudence of his defence, he was imprisoned for other reasons in the Bastile. On his liberation he visited England, where he succeeded well at first, but was ultimately over-reached by some English lawyers, and confined for a while in the Fleet. He then left the ungrateful country, and travelled through Europe till he arrived at Rome, where he was arrested in 1789. He was tried and condemned to death for being a freemason, but the sentence was afterwards commuted to perpetual imprisonment. He died in the fortress-prison of San Leo in 1795. For a detailed account of the life, adventures, and character of Joseph Balsamo, see Carlyle's Miscellanies, and Dumas' Memoirs of a Physician.