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nish, and of others which betray a Spanish origin, the names of cities, villages, and families, that rise spontaneously to the hand of the writer, and the perpetual mistakes which their enumeration occasions, among which we will only here specify that of C_a_ntador for C_o_ntador, and the omission of the words "Duc d'Uzeda," which can alone set right a flagrant anachronism--if we consider the effect of all these circumstances, we shall look in vain for any reason to doubt the result which such a complication of probabilities conspires to fortify. The objections stated by M. Neufchateau to this overwhelming mass of evidence, utterly destructive as it is to the hypothesis of which he was the advocate, are so feeble and captious, that they hardly deserve the examination which Llorente, in the anxiety of his patriotism, has condescended to bestow on then. M. Neufchateau objects to the minute references on which many of Llorente's arguments are built; but he should remember that, in an examination of this sort, it is "one thing to be minute, and another to be precarious;" one thing to be oblique, and another to be fantastical. On such occasions the more powerful the microscope is that the critic can employ, the better; not only because all suspicion of contrivance or design is thereby further removed, but because proofs, separately trifling, are, when united, irresistible; and the circumstantial evidence to which courts of justice are compelled, by the necessity of human affairs, to recur, in matters where the lives and fortunes of individuals are at stake, is not only legitimate, but indispensable, before tribunals which have not the same means of investigation at their command. In this, however, the evidence is as full, positive, and satisfactory as any evidence not appealing to the senses or mathematical demonstration for its truth, can possibly be; and any one in active life who was to forbear from acting upon it, would deserve to be treated as a lunatic. Let us, however, consider the admissions of M. Neufchateau. He admits, 1st, That Le Sage was never in Spain. 2dly, Le Sage, in 1735, acknowledged the chronological error into which he had fallen, from inserting the story of Don Pompeyo de Castro, and announced his intention to correct it. 3dly, He allows, in 1724, when the third volume of _Gil Blas_ was published, Le Sage annexed to it the Latin distich, implying that the work was at an end-- "Inveni portum, spes
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