OXIA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER CHI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} {~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}, have formed and executed the design of bringing home for honourable interment the remains of their illustrious Chief.

How many persons have actually inspected these relics, I have not ascertained; but that a real coffin, containing real bones, was brought from St. Helena to France, I see no reason to disbelieve.

Whether future visitors to St. Helena will be shown merely the identical place in which Buonaparte was (said to have been) interred, or whether another set of real bones will be exhibited in that island, we have yet to learn.

This latter supposition is not very improbable.  It was something of a credit to the island, an attraction to strangers, and a source of profit to some of the inhabitants, to possess so remarkable a relic; and this glory and advantage they must naturally wish to retain.  If so, there seems no reason why they should not have a Buonaparte of their own; for there is, I believe, no doubt that there are, or were, several Museums in England, which, among other curiosities, boasted, each, of a genuine skull of Oliver Cromwell.

Perhaps, therefore, we shall hear of several well authenticated skulls of Buonaparte also, in the collections of different virtuosos, all of whom (especially those in whose own crania the “organ of wonder” is the most largely developed) will doubtless derive equal satisfaction from the relics they respectively possess.

POSTSCRIPT TO THE NINTH EDITION.

The Public has been of late much interested and not a little bewildered, by the accounts of many strange events, said to have recently taken place in France and other parts of the Continent.  Are these accounts of such a character as to allay, or to strengthen and increase, such doubts as have been suggested in the foregoing pages?

We are told that there is now a Napoleon Buonaparte at the head of the government of France.  It is not, indeed, asserted that he is the very original Napoleon Buonaparte himself.  The death of that personage, and the transportation of his genuine bones to France, had been too widely proclaimed to allow of his reappearance in his own proper person.  But “uno avulso, non deficit alter.”  Like the Thibetian worshippers of the Dalai Lama, (who never dies; only his soul transmigrates into a fresh body), the French are so resolved, we are told, to be under a Buonaparte—­whether that be (see note to p. 56) a man or “a system”—­that they have found, it seems, a kind of new incarnation of this their Grand Lama, in a person said to be the nephew of the original one.