ion and romance; she scatters myths
and legends from her as she goes along; she is a being of poetry, and
you might fairly be sceptical whether she had any personal existence.
She is always at some beautiful, noble, bounteous work or other, if
you trust the papers. She is doing alms-deeds in the Highlands; she
meets beggars in her rides at Windsor; she writes verses in albums,
or draws sketches, or is mistaken for the house-keeper by some
blind old woman, or she runs up a hill as if she were a child. Who
finds fault with these things? he would be a cynic, he would be
white-livered, and would have gall for blood, who was not struck with
this graceful, touching evidence of the love her subjects bear her.
Who could have the head, even if he had the heart, who could be so
cross and peevish, who could be so solemn and perverse, as to say
that some of these stories _may_ be simple lies, and all of them
might have stronger evidence than they carry with them? Do you think
she is displeased at them? Why then should He, the Great Father, who
once walked the earth, look sternly on the unavoidable mistakes of
His own subjects and children in their devotion to Him and His? Even
granting they mistake some cases in particular, from the infirmity of
human nature and the contingencies of evidence, and fancy there is or
has been a miracle here and there when there is not, though a
tradition, attached to a picture, or to a shrine, or a well, be very
doubtful, though one relic be sometimes mistaken for another, and St.
Theodore stands for St. Eugenius or St. Agathocles, still, once take
into account our First Principle, that He is likely to continue
miracles among us, which is as good as the Protestant's, and I do not
see why He should feel much displeasure with us on account of this,
or should cease to work wonders in our behalf. In the Protestant's
view, indeed, who assumes that miracles never are, our thaumatology
is one great falsehood; but that is _his_ First Principle, as I have
said so often, which he does not prove but assume. If _he_, indeed,
upheld _our_ system, or _we_ held _his_ principle, in either case he
or we should be impostors; but though we should be partners to a
fraud if we thought like Protestants, we surely are not if we think
like Catholics.

"Such then is the answer I make to those who would urge against us
the multitude of miracles recorded in our Saints' Lives and
devotional works, for many of which there is lit