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with me for a month or two after. But whether he was disgusted at the incredulity with which my narrative of his services was received, or at his being so entirely neglected at head-quarters, or whether in compliance with a religious vow, I never saw or heard any more of him till I recognized him amongst the brahmins of his tribe at the great pagoda of Trichinopoly, where he gave me, as you remember, that important admonition, which prevented me from being trodden to death by Juggernaut's worshippers. It's all true," said the colonel, as he concluded.-" By, if you laugh, I will never tell you another story."

313

REMINISCENCES OF AN OLD INDIAN OFFICER.

IV.

WE thanked the colonel for his anecdotes of the Grand Alguazil; but the barrister could not abstain from remarking that, out of the vast storehouse of so long a military experience, he might have selected something that, hovering on the very brink of improbability, would at the same time be more stirring and awakening in its effect.

"I am far from denying," said he, "that Hieronymo's adventures are passing strange; but they are obviously interwoven with a tissue of the supernatural-at least, enough to subdue and blunt the edge of the emotions excited by those incidents, in which nature, confining herself, as it were, to her own workshop, weaves a web, wild and fanciful indeed, out of the intricate and puzzled skein of mere human agencies. Now Hieronymo was a being either belonging to, or commercing with, the unknown world. He is something the earth

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owns not'-the denizen of another orb, whose participation in the concerns of our own is that of a blind and fated minister, who does the biddings and acts from the impulse of an overruling will. The miracle dissipates the mystery, as the sun dissolves frost-work. Yet if our excellent friend would overhaul his knapsack, he would be at no loss for adventures, in which, how strange and even miraculous soever (for the poverty of language drives us to the metaphor), even obscurity is cleared, and every involution unravelled, without a moment's rupture of continuity in that grand chain of causation, which contains and circumscribes all human affairs.

“And it is astonishing," continued the barrister, "what singular dramas, tragedy and comedy, alternately provoking tears and laughter, nature gets up in her own theatre: examine them, you will find that her plots are as intricate, and in one sense as artificial, as those of a regular dramatic author aiming at the gratification of an audience. Nay, the comic poets have sometimes pilfered her best plots; and especially when nature, as she sometimes does, condescending as it were to be a plagiarist from herself, makes one individual an exact fac-simile usque ad unguem of another. These casual resemblances, however, which some

times perplex us as with the confusion of a carnival, are providentially of most rare occurrence; otherwise the social machine would be stopped in its movement, and life rendered unquiet and unsafe. For, conceive an Antipholis of Ephesus and an Antipholis of Syracuse, with their corresponding Dromios, in every city of Great Britain. Things would revert to chaos and disorder. Nor, in truth, would there be any thing intrinsically comic, if Amphitryons and Sosias were frequently to find their way to our wives and their soubrettes. Happily, the mischief is counterbalanced by its rarity. That this is the case, is manifest from a remarkable fact in dramatic history. In the ancient theatres, where masques were worn by the actors, it was easy enough to get up the Menæchmus and the Amphitryon of Plautus; whereas it never happened but once, and that was in Garrick's time, that Shakspeare's Comedy of Errors was performed with the complete theatric illusion of two human counterparts, so uniform in figure, feature, and complexion, that the audience would have been unable to discriminate them but by the variation of their dress. For the two Dromios he was obliged to put up with vague and general likeness. While the piece had its run, Antipholis of Syracuse, having unluckily committed a forgery, was hanged, and

in consequence of that catastrophe, as Garrick used to tell the story, the play was suspended also.

"Yet neither Plautus nor Molière, rich in whim and frolic as they were, ever constructed a comedy, founded on a similar ambiguity, half so diverting as Le Faux Martin Guère-a case of personal identity thrice determined in three French parliaments, each adjudication being at variance with the other. The evidence of the senses, the primary source of human testimony and the only standard of judicial truth, was discredited and set at nought. The eye, the ear, and the touch, became complete fools and drivellers. That moral assurance, on which the understanding relies for all its conclusions, appeared extinct. Nothing, in short, seemed to be but what was not. Clouds of living witnesses were encountered by an opposing cloud, all uttering honest and uncorrupted attestations. Two wives were contradicted when they swore to their respective husbands-the uncle when he identified his nephew-the neighbours when they swore to a man who had been born and lived amongst them from his birth.

"It is only by long and protracted cycles," continued the barrister, "that these strange ambiguities intervene to perplex the course of justice, as ships are misled by false lights. But there was

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