Page:Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buonaparte 11th ed - Richard Whately (1874).djvu/48

 they should not have a Buonaparte of their own; for there is, I believe, no doubt that there are, or were, several museums in England, which, among other curiosities, boasted, each, of a genuine skull of Oliver Cromwell.

Perhaps, therefore, we shall hear of several well-authenticated skulls of Buonaparte also, in the collections of different virtuosos, all of whom (especially those in whose own crania the "organ of wonder" is the most largely developed), will doubtless derive equal satisfaction from the relics they respectively possess.

public has been of late much interested, and not a little bewildered, by the accounts of many strange events, said to have recently taken place in France and other parts of the Continent. Are these accounts of such a character as to allay, or to strengthen and increase, such doubts as have been suggested in the foregoing pages?

We are told that there is now a Napoleon Buonaparte at the head of the government of France. It is not, indeed, asserted that he is the very original Napoleon Buonaparte himself. The death of that personage, and the transportation of his genuine bones to France, had been too widely proclaimed to allow of his reappearance in his own proper person. But "uno avulso, non deficit alter." Like the Thibetian worshippers of the Delai Lama (who never dies; only, his soul transmigrates into a fresh body), the French are so resolved, we are told, to be under a Buonaparte—whether that be (see note to p. 36) a man or "a system"—that they have found, it seems, a kind of new incarnation of this their grand Lama, in a person said to be the nephew of the original one.