such person ever performed all the wonderful things attributed to
him;—let him then weigh well the objections to that evidence, (of
which I have given but a hasty and imperfect sketch,) and if he then
finds it amount to anything _more_ than a probability, I have only to
congratulate him on his easy faith.

* * * * *

But the same testimony which would have great weight in establishing a
thing intrinsically probable, will lose part of this weight in
proportion as the matter attested is improbable; and if adduced in
support of anything that is at variance with uniform experience,[10]
will be rejected at once by all sound reasoners. Let us then consider
what sort of a story it is that is proposed to our acceptance. How
grossly contradictory are the reports of the different authorities, I
have already remarked: but consider, by itself, the story told by any
one of them; it carries an air of fiction and romance on the very face
of it. All the events are great, and splendid, and marvellous;[11] great
armies,—great victories,—great frosts,—great reverses,—"hair-breadth
'scapes,"—empires subverted in a few days; everything happened in
defiance of political calculations, and in opposition to the
_experience_ of past times; everything upon that grand scale, so common
in Epic Poetry, so rare in real life; and thus calculated to strike the
imagination of the vulgar, and to remind the sober-thinking few of the
Arabian Nights. Every event, too, has that _roundness_ and completeness
which is so characteristic of fiction; nothing is done by halves; we
have _complete_ victories,—_total_ overthrows, _entire_ subversion of
empires,—_perfect_ re-establishments of them,—crowded upon us in rapid
succession. To enumerate the improbabilities of each of the several
parts of this history, would fill volumes; but they are so fresh in