very chest itself!' After this ocular demonstration [again Boswell's italics], there was no more to be said."* No more to be said. So thought honest Catcot; and so, too, thought Samuel Johnson, -with a difference. What further proof needed France of the sublime story of the sinking the Vengeur-the deathless suicidal Vengeur, "in a mad whirlwind of fire, and shouting, and invincible despair," as Mr. Carlyle phrases it, going down into the ocean depths,-than that wooden Model of the ship, solemnly consecrated in the Pantheon of Great Men, which beckoned figuratively from its peg, "Aux grands hommes, la patrie reconnaissante." Doubts were indeed more than once started by sceptics even among the French. But the "solemn Convention decrees," and notably the wooden "Modèle du Vengeur" hanging visibly there, the "glory of France," what Frenchman could gainsay or resist? "Such doubts were instantly blown away again," in the presence of proof patriotic and demonstrative like that. Seeing is believing. So men saw the wooden Model, and believed. An attaché to Lord Strangford's embassy at Constantinople describes‡ his having witnessed a rising of a Greek suburb, on the discovery in the Bosphorus of the corpse of a lad who had been missing for some days. The body-which was found tied hand and foot, and stabbed in various parts-was that of a Greek merchant's son; and "the Greek population unhesitatingly regarded him as having fallen a victim (lo riguardò indubitatamente) to the Jews, whose Passover had taken place a few days before."§ Therefore, deny it not. There is a passing reference to Smith the Weaver's grand finale of a Q. E. D., in Mr. de Quincey's picturesque monograph on the Spanish Military Nun, Catalina de Erauso,-that strange eventful history, in which, as narrated with his abrupt transitions and alternations of impassioned earnestness and gleeful whim, the extremes may be said to meet of tragedy and farce. It is where the Alférez is implicated in a murder at Tucuman, and a witness testifies to having seen the Alférez-who is Kate in disguise-take a flying leap from the balcony of the house where and when the crime was committed. "Evidence like this was conclusive; no defence was listened to, nor indeed had the prisoner any to produce. The Alférez could deny neither the staircase nor the balcony; the street is there to this day, like the bricks in Jack Cade's chimney, testifying all that may be required."|| Leigh Hunt had an anecdote of a per-fervid Scot who claimed to be a direct descendant from the Admirable Crichton; and who, in conclusive proof of his claim, used to mention that he had " a grit quantity o' tableleenen in his possession, marked A. C., Admirable Creechton." Sir Bernard Burke exposed himself to a hit from the reviewers for seeming more inclined to believe than to disbelieve a wonderful story," *Boswell's Life of Johnson, sub anno 1776. † Carlyle's Miscellanies, vol. iv. On the Sinking of the Vengeur. Travels in Turkey, 1829. ** in § See rev. of Gambini's "Della Cittadinanza Giudaica in Europa," in Sat. Rev., vi. 334. De Quincey's works, vol. iii. p. 69, edit. 1854. Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, ch. x. **See Saturday Review, No. 253. which the remarkable docility of certain bridled bulls is a small miracle compared with the existence (said they) of a family named Shobington before the Norman Conquest. An Elfric or an Eadric riding the bull in A.D. 1066 is supposable enough, but who can believe in a Shobington of that date? "Whenever he lived, or whatever he rode, you may be quite sure that there was no Shobington of Shobington, on a bull's back or off it, in the year 1066.” But observe now the evidence appealed to by the Ulster King-at-Arms in favour of Shobington and the bull:-" The truth of this story is said to be confirmed by long tradition in the family, by several memoirs which they have remaining, and by the ruins of the works that are to this day to be seen in the park of Bulstrode."* Well might Sir Bernard's reviewers inquire, how can any ruins, of whatever date or kind, prove that a man was called Shobington, or that he rode upon a bull? M. Ampère will have it, in his Roman History at Rome,† that no one who has actually seen the Eternal City, and taken the trouble to observe the connexion between the alleged events of the primitive, or "pre-historical," period and the localities said to be their theatre, can hesitate to admit the substantial accuracy of the stories to which the historians have given currency concerning the kings and the early republic. But, as one of M. Ampère's English critics reminds him, that a legend should possess plausible local colouring, proves nothing as to its truth. It is likely à priori that it would possess it. Among all the sources of fable there is none more prolific than an ancient monument or a marked local feature connected with a particular name. Half a hundred remarkable places in Scotland are connected with Thomas the Rhymer. But what would be thought of an author who should argue for the truth of Thomas the Rhymer's legend on the ground that the acts attributed to him corresponded with the hill, valley, or ruin, stated to be their theatre? Everybody would answer, with the authority we are quoting, that the pretended events were invented to explain the connexion between the place and the name. Probably there was such a person as True Thomas who once lived in the valley of the Tweed, and the Eildon Hills have certainly three summits; but the coincidence does not establish the story as to the mode in which the Eildons were "cleft in three."+ Captain Gronow, in the Second Series of his Recollections, § repeats, as from personal observation, the old fallacy about Wellington and Blucher meeting at La Belle Alliance, on the evening of the battle of Waterloo.|| He escapes, however, committing himself to the logic which half amused, half exasperated Wellington-on the part of those who had seen the very chair on which the Duke sat down in the farm-house; and seeing's believing, you know. The street patterers of London, and those who buy their wares, would seem to be facile followers of our Smith the logician. For evidence of Vicissitudes of Families, Second Series (1860), p. 341. L'Histoire Romaine à Rome. Par J. J. Ampère. Paris: 1862. Saturday Review, No. 325. Smith, Elder, and Co. 1863. Wellington himself distinctly disposed of this story as a "falsehood," and a "remarkable" one, in a letter of his, dated June 8, 1816, to be found in vol. x. of his Supplementary Despatches. It was at Genappe, after ten at night, that the meeting actually took place. this, consult passim Mr. Mayhew's "London Labour." One man, for instance, sold narratives of the appearance of Rush the murderer, after death, to Emily Sandford-" as is shown in the Australian papers;" how he "threatened her, took her by the neck, and there's the red marks of his fingers to be seen on her neck to this day!" Another man sold narratives of Mrs. Manning's misdoings, attracting customers by a faithful likeness of the murderess on his show-board: "There's the board before them when I runs on that line of patter, and when I appeals to the 'lustration, it seems to cooper the thing. They must believe their eyes."+ As one other specimen from the streets, take the glib vendor of cornsalve, who displays a little box containing a large corn drawn by this salve from "the honourable foot of the late lamented Sir Robert Peel." The corn from the "honourable foot" of Sir Robert Peel, or any one else likely to interest the audience, has been scraped and trimmed from a cow's heel, Mr. Mayhew tells us, and may safely be submitted to the inspection and handling of the credulous. "There it is," the corn-salve seller will reiterate "it speaks for itself."+ Mr. Dickens has a story of one Gabriel Grub, sexton and gravedigger, whom the goblins were supposed to have carried away one night-some very credible witnesses not being wanting who had distinctly seen him whisked through the air on the back of a chesnut horse, blind of one eye, with the hind-quarters of a lion, and the tail of a bear. All this was at last devoutly believed in the village where he was missing; and the new sexton used to exhibit to the curious, for a trifling emolument, a goodsized piece of the church weathercock which had been accidentally kicked off by the aforesaid horse in his aërial flight, and picked up by himself in the churchyard a year or two afterwards. He were a bold man that. would venture to controvert§ a material guarantee like that. So again in the same author's description of the old Maypole Inn, on the borders of Epping Forest: a legend is mentioned of Queen Elizabeth not only having slept there one night while on a hunting excursion, but of her having, next morning, while standing on a mounting-block before the door with one foot in the stirrup, boxed and cuffed an unlucky page for some neglect of duty. The matter-of-fact and doubtful folks, of whom there were a few among the Maypole customers, as unluckily there always are in every little community, were inclined to look upon this tradition as apocryphal; but whenever the landlord of that ancient hostelry appealed to the mounting-block itself as evidence, and triumphantly pointed out that there it stood in the same place to that very day, the • London Labour and the London Poor, vol. i. p. 229. † Ibid., p. 302. Ibid., p. 428. S Applicable to the subject is the triumphant ratiocination of the Judge in an episode of the great case of Bardell versus Pickwick. "What's your Christian name, sir ?" angrily inquired his deaf lordship of Mr. Winkle, in the witness-box. "Nathaniel, sir."-"Daniel,-any other name?"-"Nathaniel, sir-my Lord, I mean."-"Nathaniel Daniel, or Daniel Nathaniel?"-"No, my lord, only Nathaniel-not Daniel at all."-" What did you tell me it was Daniel for, then, sir?" inquired the judge.—“I didn't, my lord,” replied Mr. Winkle.—“You did, sir,” replied the judge, with a severe frown. "How could I have got Daniel on my notes, unless you told me so, sir?" This argument was, of course, unanswerable. -The Pickwick Papers, ch. xxxiv. doubters never failed to be put down by a large majority, and all true believers exulted as in a victory.* Fielding's Partridge clinches his argument for evil spirits being in the habit of carrying away people bodily, by "a true story I could tell you" of such a preternatural deportation, in which instance the man was conveyed through the keyhole of the door. And let no one hint disbelief of this conveyance; for "I have seen the very house where it was done, and nobody hath lived in it these thirty years." Here be proofs, I hope. When Clive Newcome becomes acquainted with Cousin Ethel, he takes care, in his pride of pedigree, to question her as to her belief in their common ancestor, the Barber-Surgeon. "Do you believe in him?" asks Clive. 66 Why should we disown our family ?" Miss Ethel answers, simply. (There is a noble lord listening and looking on.) "In those early days I suppose people did-did all sorts of things, and it was not considered at all out of the way to be Surgeon to William the Conqueror." "Edward the Confessor," interposes Clive, correcting her. "And it must be true, because I have seen a picture of the BarberSurgeon a friend of mine, Mr. Collop, did the picture, and I dare say it is for sale still."+ In an earlier work of the same author's there is a case of arson-the calamity of the conflagration being attributed to the drunkenness of a scoundrelly Irish watchman, who was employed on the premises, and who upset a bottle of whisky in the warehouse of Messrs. Shadrach, and incautiously looked for the liquor with a lighted candle. The Insurance office requiring proof, proof was brought; and such proof as would have satisfied the exacting logic of Smith the Weaver. The man was taken to the office by his employers; "and certainly, as we all could testify,' confesses a convinced and the most conspicuous clerk, was even then in a state of frightful intoxication."‡ But a more direct illustration of the subject occurs in a less known production of Mr. Thackeray's, his Great Cossack Epic, in twenty books, which tells, inter alia, how the statue of Saint Sophia, at Kioff, wrought miracles on a walking expedition upon the very waters of the Dnieper. The twentieth book of the Epic comprises two lines, and these the poet prints in capitals; nor, in honour to him and to the subject, can we do less: THINK NOT, O READER, THAT WE'RE LAUGHING AT YOU; Barnaby Rudge, ch. i. †The Newcomes, ch. xlii. The History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond, ch. x. LORD LYNDHURST. MORE than ninety years ago, "when George the Third was king," and Washington was but a village in what were still "his Majesty's North American colonies," the great lawyer and statesman, whose character and career are the subject of the present article, was born at Boston, in Massachusetts, then still a part of the British empire. Only a few weeks since, there was living amongst us a man who was a scholar at Cambridge nearly three-quarters of a century ago; who was a schoolboy when Blackstone and Lord Chief Justice Mansfield were still living, and saw Dr. Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds; who witnessed the surges of the French Revolution, and (as he told the House of Lords in 1859) could recollect the day when every part of the opposite coast was blockaded by an English fleet; remembered the victories of Camperdown, St. Vincent, and the Nile; and, above all, that triumphant fight at Trafalgar, which almost annihilated the navies of France and Spain; he recollected the expulsion of the French from Egypt, the achievement of victory after victory in the Peninsula; the operations of the British army in the south of France; and, last of all, the great battle which ended the war. In his long lifetime he not only beheld events abroad which changed many dynasties of Europe, but saw at home the ebb and flow of public opinion upon great political questions which threatened to remodel the English constitution; he might have witnessed the parliamentary conflictsof Burke, and Pitt, and Fox; and was not only Lord Chancellor when Queen Victoria was a child, but saw the "dull and decorous court" of George III., and had become eminent at the Bar, when the Prince Regent was giving balls at Carlton House; in his infancy occurred the riots which preceded the revolt of the North American colonies from the mother country; and he beheld the rise of the United States and their growth into one of the great powers of the world. His life, in short, was one of the last remaining links which connected our time with the life and characters of the latter years of the last century, and recals names and incidents that have receded far into the past. It was on the 21st of May, 1772, that JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY, the future Chancellor of England, was born. Mr. Copley, his father, was the son of Richard Copley of Limerick, by the daughter of Mr. John Singleton, an ancestor of the Singletons of Queenville Abbey, Clare, but was a native of Boston, where he was at that time practising in his profession of a portrait-painter; his mother was the daughter of Mr. Clarke, then "factor" in the tea trade for the East India Company, and little Copley may have seen his grandfather's tea-chests thrown overboard by the excited populace of Boston in the riot by which they signalised their determination to resist taxation by the mother country. But civil strife soon drove the American colonist from his home, and in 1774-two years before the Declaration of Independence-Mr. Copley, like many other royalists, quitted the New World for the protection of the British government in England. From the time of his arrival in London, he resided and practised in the house in which his more distinguished son always continued to live |