the same time assured that the most competent witnesses had begun with incredulity and ended in full belief. There was a manufactory of affidavits ready to be submitted for the signature of all who had made even a partial surrender of their judgment. The man himself, it was always admitted, was indeed a prodigious development, so the comparison was always led away from the person to some minute or out-of-the-way circumstances, which it was said 'none but Roger Tichborne could possibly have known.' Few considered how completely the defenses had been opened to the claimant, and that he had the run of the Tichborne annals, archives, gossip, and every thing. Every day he had opportunities of acquiring a little more of the social gloss which befitted his assumed rank; every day his stock of information was added to; every fresh witness contributed some items; every day of both trials supplied new materials; every time a question was repeated, the claimant could answer it better than before, being better informed and better advised. Then he could always plead the tricks of memory, and was neither ashamed to have things brought to his remembrance nor to have forgotten what he had said the day before."
Of the stupendous trial which followed, the whole world is aware. Six years ago the claimant applied to the Court of Chancery as a first step to legal proceedings, and three years since he commenced a trial of ejectment in the court of Common Pleas, which lasted six months. Nine months ago he was himself put upon his trial for perjuries committed in the former case, and after 188 days' adjudication he was convicted by the jury in half an hour, as a perjured impostor. The solicitor-general occupied thirty-one days in opening the case, the counsel for defense consumed forty-seven days in summing up, and the chief-justice took eighteen days to deliver his charge, which would have filled 180 columns of the London Times. Half a million dollars were contributed by the English people, in the shape of bonds, to enable the claimant to prosecute the case, and, according to the Spectator, it cost to all parties—the crown, the Tichborne family, and the defendant's supporters—more than a million and a quarter of dollars!
Such are the leading features of the most extraordinary and the most celebrated lawsuit in all history, which has just come to an end. The question now arises how it became possible to get up so tremendous a struggle over so simple an issue. It might perplex us, far away as we are, to find a satisfactory answer, but the whole British press comes to our relief with a unanimity and an emphasis that are quite remarkable. They agree that the cause of so monstrous and overgrown a procedure is not to be ascribed to the defects of English law-practice, but to the gross ignorance, the silly love of the marvelous, the stupid credulity, and the wide-mouthed gullibility of the English people, who backed up the case and furnished the means for fighting it. The Spectator says: "The credulity which has been disclosed throughout the case is positively frightful.... Evidence of the most unanswerable character left the believers absolutely unmoved." And of the judge's charge it says: "Nothing but that slow-dripping, luminous narrative, with all its lengthy letters, and all its moral reflections, and all its apt quotations to justify its actions, would ever have fairly driven its illusions out of the British public." The Saturday Review says:
"Bishop Butler is reported to have once turned upon his secretary with the alarming inquiry, 'Why might not large bodies of men, and whole communities, be seized with fits of insanity as well as individuals?' The startled secretary could only suggest reliance upon Providence to avert such a calamity. It would certainly appear, however, that there are epidemics, if not of insanity, at least of infectious folly and unreasonableness, which come to pretty much the same thing. It is scarcely possible to account in any other way for such a deplorable exhibition of human silliness as has been afforded in connection with the Tichborne case. The really amazing thing about this imposture, as we look back on it, is, that it should ever have imposed on anybody. . . . An elastic credulity, however, can swallow any thing,
