was hallowed by hereditary veneration?  No; we are told he was a low-born usurper, and not even a Frenchman!  Is it that he was a good and kind sovereign?  He is represented not only as an imperious and merciless despot, but as most wantonly careless of the lives of his soldiers.  Could the French army and people have failed to hear from the wretched survivors of his supposed Russian expedition, how they had left the corpses of above 100,000 of their comrades bleaching on the snow-drifts of that dismal country, whither his mad ambition had conducted him, and where his selfish cowardice had deserted them?  Wherever we turn to seek for circumstances that may help to account for the events of this incredible story, we only meet with such as aggravate its improbability.[15] Had it been told of some distant country, at a remote period, we could not have told what peculiar circumstances there might have been to render probable what seems to us most strange; and yet in that case every philosophical sceptic, every free-thinking speculator, would instantly have rejected such a history, as utterly unworthy of credit.  What, for instance, would the great Hume, or any of the philosophers of his school, have said, if they had found in the antique records of any nation, such a passage as this?  “There was a certain man of Corsica, whose name was Napoleon, and he was one of the chief captains of the host of the French; and he gathered together an army, and went and fought against Egypt:  but when the king of Britain heard thereof, he sent ships of war and valiant men to fight against the French in Egypt.  So they warred against them, and prevailed, and strengthened the hands of the rulers of the land against the French, and drave away Napoleon from before the city of Acre.  Then Napoleon left the captains and the army that were in Egypt, and fled, and returned back to France.  So the French people, took Napoleon, and made him ruler over them, and he became exceeding great, insomuch that there was none like him of all that had ruled over France before.”

What, I say, would Hume have thought of this, especially if he had been told that it was at this day generally credited?  Would he not have confessed that he had been mistaken in supposing there was a peculiarly blind credulity and prejudice in favour of everything that is accounted sacred;[16] for that, since even professed sceptics swallow implicitly such a story as this, it appears there must be a still blinder prejudice in favour of everything that is not accounted sacred?

Suppose, again, we found in this history such passages as the following:  “And it came to pass after these things that Napoleon strengthened himself, and gathered together another host instead of that which he had lost, and went and warred against the Prussians, and the Russians, and the Austrians, and all the rulers of the north country, which were confederate against him.  And the ruler of Sweden, also, which