and romantic adventures with which we have so long been amused, we are not told.  Did they perceive in his physiognomy, his true name, and authentic history?  Truly this evidence is such as country people give one for a story of apparitions; if you discover any signs of incredulity, they triumphantly show the very house which the ghost haunted, the identical dark corner where it used to vanish, and perhaps even the tombstone of the person whose death it foretold.  Jack Cade’s nobility was supported by the same irresistible kind of evidence:  having asserted that the eldest son of Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, was stolen by a beggar-woman, “became a bricklayer when he came to age,” and was the father of the supposed Jack Cade; one of his companions confirms the story, by saying, “Sir, he made a chimney in my father’s house, and the bricks are alive at this day to testify it; therefore, deny it not.”

Much of the same kind is the testimony of our brave countrymen, who are ready to produce the scars they received in fighting against this terrible Buonaparte.  That they fought and were wounded, they may safely testify; and probably they no less firmly believe what they were told respecting the cause in which they fought:  it would have been a high breach of discipline to doubt it; and they, I conceive, are men better skilled in handling a musket, than in sifting evidence, and detecting imposture.  But I defy any one of them to come forward and declare, on his own knowledge, what was the cause in which he fought,—­under whose commands the opposed generals acted,—­and whether the person who issued those commands did really perform the mighty achievements we are told of.

Let those, then, who pretend to philosophical freedom of inquiry,—­who scorn to rest their opinions on popular belief, and to shelter themselves under the example of the unthinking multitude, consider carefully, each one for himself, what is the evidence proposed to himself in particular, for the existence of such a person as Napoleon Buonaparte:—­I do not mean, whether there ever was a person bearing that name, for that is a question of no consequence; but whether any such person ever performed all the wonderful things attributed to him;—­let him then weigh well the objections to that evidence, (of which I have given but a hasty and imperfect sketch,) and if he then finds it amount to anything more than a probability, I have only to congratulate him on his easy faith.

* * * * *

But the same testimony which would have great weight in establishing a thing intrinsically probable, will lose part of this weight in proportion as the matter attested is improbable; and if adduced in support of anything that is at variance with uniform experience,[10] will be rejected at once by all sound reasoners.  Let us then consider what sort of a story it is that is proposed to our acceptance.  How grossly contradictory