Historic Doubts Relative To Napoleon Buonaparte | Page 9

the cocked hat had gone through all the marvellous 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 are the reports of the different authorities, I have already
remarked: but consider, by itself, the story told by any one of them; it
carries an air of fiction and romance on the very face of it. All the
events are great, and splendid, and marvellous;[11] great armies,--great
victories,--great frosts,--great reverses,--"hair-breadth
'scapes,"--empires subverted in a few days; everything happened in
defiance of political calculations, and in opposition to the experience of
past times; everything upon that grand scale, so common in Epic Poetry,
so rare in real life; and thus calculated to strike the imagination of the
vulgar, and to remind the sober-thinking few of the Arabian Nights.
Every event, too, has that roundness and completeness which is so
characteristic of fiction; nothing is done by halves; we have complete
victories,--total overthrows, entire subversion of empires,--perfect
re-establishments of them,--crowded upon us in rapid succession. To
enumerate the improbabilities of each of the several parts of this history,
would fill volumes; but they are so fresh in every one's memory, that
there is no need of such a detail: let any judicious man, not ignorant of
history and of human nature, revolve them in his mind, and consider
how far they are conformable to Experience,[12] our best and only sure
guide. In vain will he seek in history for something similar to this

wonderful Buonaparte; "nought but himself can be his parallel."
Will the conquests of Alexander be compared with his? They were
effected over a rabble of effeminate, undisciplined barbarians; else his
progress would hardly have been so rapid: witness his father Philip,
who was much longer occupied in subduing the comparatively
insignificant territory of the warlike and civilized Greeks,
notwithstanding their being divided into numerous petty States, whose
mutual jealousy enabled him