young rustic, who had never heard of novels and romances as a bare
possibility amongst all the shameless devices of London swindlers, had
read with religious fidelity every word of this tale, so thoroughly
life-like, surrendering her perfect faith and her loving sympathy to
the different persons in the tale, and the natural distresses in which
they are involved, without suspecting, for a moment, that by so much as
a breathing of exaggeration or of embellishment the pure gospel truth
of the narrative could have been sullied. She listened, in a kind of
breathless stupor, to my frank explanation--that not part only, but the
whole, of this natural tale was a pure invention. Scorn and indignation
flashed from her eyes. She regarded herself as one who had been hoaxed
and swindled; begged me to take back the book; and never again, to the
end of her life, could endure to look into the book, or to be reminded
of that criminal imposture which Dr. Oliver Goldsmith had practised
upon her youthful credulity.

In that case, a book altogether fabulous, and not meaning to offer
itself for anything else, had been read as genuine history. Here, on
the other hand, the adventures of the Spanish Nun, which in every
detail of time and place have since been sifted and authenticated,
stood a good chance at one period of being classed as the most lawless
of romances. It is, indeed, undeniable, and this arises as a natural
result from the bold, adventurous character of the heroine, and from
the unsettled state of society at that period in Spanish America, that
a reader the most credulous would at times be startled with doubts upon
what seems so unvarying a tenor of danger and lawless violence. But, on
the other hand, it is also undeniable that a reader the most
obstinately sceptical would be equally startled in the very opposite
direction, on remarking that the incidents are far from being such as a
romance-writer would have been likely to invent; since, if striking,