Memorials and Other Papers | Page 6

these points which in this case it would have been so
natural to make. Indeed, considering the exquisite verisimilitude of the
work meeting with such absolute inexperience in the reader, it was
almost a duty to have made them. This duty, however, something had
caused me to forget; and when next I saw the young mountaineer, I
forgot that I had forgotten it. Consequently, at first I was perplexed by
the unfaltering gravity with which my fair young friend spoke of Dr.
Primrose, of Sophia and her sister, of Squire Thornhill, &c., as real and
probably living personages, who could sue and be sued. It appeared that
this artless young rustic, who had never heard of novels and romances
as a bare possibility amongst all the shameless devices of London
swindlers, had read with religious fidelity every word of this tale, so
thoroughly life-like, surrendering her perfect faith and her loving
sympathy to the different persons in the tale, and the natural distresses
in which they are involved, without suspecting, for a moment, that by

so much as a breathing of exaggeration or of embellishment the pure
gospel truth of the narrative could have been sullied. She listened, in a
kind of breathless stupor, to my frank explanation--that not part only,
but the whole, of this natural tale was a pure invention. Scorn and
indignation flashed from her eyes. She regarded herself as one who had
been hoaxed and swindled; begged me to take back the book; and never
again, to the end of her life, could endure to look into the book, or to be
reminded of that criminal imposture which Dr. Oliver Goldsmith had
practised upon her youthful credulity.
In that case, a book altogether fabulous, and not meaning to offer itself
for anything else, had been read as genuine history. Here, on the other
hand, the adventures of the Spanish Nun, which in every detail of time
and place have since been sifted and authenticated, stood a good chance
at one period of being classed as the most lawless of romances. It is,
indeed, undeniable, and this arises as a natural result from the bold,
adventurous character of the heroine, and from the unsettled state of
society at that period in Spanish America, that a reader the most
credulous would at times be startled with doubts upon what seems so
unvarying a tenor of danger and lawless violence. But, on the other
hand, it is also undeniable that a reader the most obstinately sceptical
would be equally startled in the very opposite direction, on remarking
that the incidents are far from being such as a romance-writer would
have been likely to invent; since, if striking, tragic, and even appalling,
they are at times repulsive. And it seems evident that, once putting
himself to the cost of a wholesale fiction, the writer would have used
his privilege more freely for his own advantage. Whereas the author of
these memoirs clearly writes under the coercion and restraint of a
notorious reality, that would not suffer him to ignore or to modify the
leading facts. Then, as to the objection that few people or none have an
experience presenting such uniformity of perilous adventure, a little
closer attention shows that the experience in this case is not uniform;
and so far otherwise, that a period of several years in Kate's South
American life is confessedly suppressed; and on no other ground
whatever than that this long parenthesis is not adventurous, not
essentially differing from the monotonous character of ordinary
Spanish life.
Suppose the case, therefore, that Kate's memoirs had been thrown upon

the world with no vouchers for their authenticity beyond such internal
presumptions as would have occurred to thoughtful readers, when
reviewing the entire succession of incidents, I am of opinion that the
person best qualified by legal experience to judge of evidence would
finally have pronounced a favorable award; since it is easy to
understand that in a world so vast as the Peru, the Mexico, the Chili, of
Spaniards during the first quarter of the seventeenth century, and under
the slender modification of Indian manners as yet effected by the Papal
Christianization of those countries, and in the neighborhood of a
river-system so awful, of a mountain-system so unheard-of in Europe,
there would probably, by blind, unconscious sympathy, grow up a
tendency to lawless and gigantesque ideals of adventurous life; under
which, united with the duelling code of Europe, many things would
become trivial and commonplace experiences that to us home-bred
English ("_qui musas colimus severiores_") seem monstrous and
revolting.
Left, therefore, to itself, my belief is, that the story of the Military Nun
would have prevailed finally against the demurs of the sceptics.
However, in the mean time, all such demurs were suddenly and
officially silenced forever. Soon