Charles Godfrey Leland was an American humorist and folklorist, best known in his own lifetime as the author of the comic Hans Breitmann’s Ballads (1871). He spent his later years in Europe collecting folk tales, publishing Legends of Florence, Collected from the People in 1896 and the witchcraft text Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches. The four words that would later define modern celebrity appear almost in passing in his 1896 Florentine collection — a stray jab at “an actress famous for being famous, nothing more.”