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every mortal cause; they have been for ages the safeguard of all great and wary minds; and neither I nor any other man can lay down any general position of reasoning, that will guide men aright, who are so arrogant, so ignorant, or so weak, as to scorn them.

On the other hand, if your readers will accept these safeguards, the general principle I have laid down will never deceive them; it will show them who the Claimant is, and it will aid them in far greater difficulties, and more important inquiries; for, like all sound principles of reason, it is equally applicable to questions of science, literature, history, or crime. I am, Sir, yours faithfully, CHARLES READE.

SECOND LETTER

SIR,—A single indisputable coincidence raises a presumption that often points towards the truth.

A priori what is more unlikely than that the moon, a mere satellite, and a very small body, should so attract the giant earth as to cause our tides? Indeed, for years science rejected the theory; but certain changes of the tide coinciding regularly with changes of the moon wore out prejudice, and have established the truth. Yet these coincident changes, though repeated ad infinitum, make but one logical coincidence.

On the other hand, it must be owned that a single coincidence often deceives. To take a sublunary and appropriate example, the real Martin Guerre had a wart on his cheek; so had the sham Martin Guerre. The coincidence was genuine and remarkable: yet the men were distinct. But mark the ascending ratio-see the influence on the mind of a double coincidence-when the impostor with the real wart told the sisters of Martin Guerre some particulars of their family history, and reminded Martin's wife of something he had said to her on their bridal night, in the solitude of the nuptial chamber, this seeming knowledge, coupled with that real wart, struck her mind with the force of a double coincidence ; and no more was needed to make her accept the impostor, and cohabit with him for years.

Does not this enforce what I urged in my first letter as to the severe caution necessary in receiving alleged, or seeming, or manipulated coincidences, as if they were proved and real ones? However, I use the above incident at present mainly

to show the ascending power on the mind of coincidences when received as genuine.

I will now show their ascending value when proved in open court and tested by cross-examination.

A. was found dead of a gunshot wound, and the singed paper that had been used for wadding lay near him. It was a fragment of the Times. B.'s house was searched, and they found there a gun recently discharged, and the copy of the Times, from which the singed paper aforesaid had been torn; the pieces fitted exactly.

The same thing happened in France with a slight variation; the paper used for wadding was part of an old breviary, subsequently found in B.'s house.

The salient facts of each case made a treble coincidence. What was the result? The treble coincidence sworn, crossexamined, and unshaken, hanged the Englishman, and guillotined the Frenchman. In neither case was there a scintilla of direct evidence; in neither case was the verdict impugned.

I speak within bounds when I say that a genuine double coincidence, proved beyond doubt, is not twice, but two hundred times, as strong, as one such coincidence, and that a genuine treble coincidence is many thousand times as strong as one such coincidence. But, when we get to a fivefold coincidence real and proved, it is a million to one against all these honest circumstances having combined to deceive us.

As for a sevenfold coincidence not manipulated, nor merely alleged, but fully proved, does either history, science, literature, or crime offer one example of its ever misleading the human mind? Why, the very existence of seven independent and indisputable coincidences, all pointing to one conclusion, is a rarity so great, that, in all my reading, I hardly know where to find an example of it except in the defence that baffled this claimant at Nisi Prius.

Now, on that occasion, the parties encountered each other plump on various lines of evidence. There were direct recognitions of his personal identity by respectable witnesses, and direct disavowals of the same by respectable witnesses, just as there were in the case of the sham Martin Guerre, who brought thirty honest disinterested witnesses to swear he was the man he turned out not to be.

With this part of the case I will not meddle here, though I have plenty to say upon it.

But both parties also multiplied coincidences: only some of these were real, some apparent, some manipulated, some

honest and independent, some said or sworn out of court by liars, who knew better than venture into the witness-box with them; some proved by cross-examination, or in spite of it. We have only to subject this hodge-podge of real and sham to the approved test laid down in my first letter, and we shall see daylight; for the Claimant's is a clear case, made obscure by verbosity, and conjecture in the teeth of proof!

A. He proved in court a genuine coincidence of a corporeal kind—viz., that Roger Tichborne was in-kneed, with the left leg turned out more than the right, and the Claimant was inkneed in a similar way.

This is a remarkable coincidence, and cross-examination failed to shake it.

But when he attempted to prove a second coincidence of corporeal peculiarities like the above, which, being the work of nature, cannot be combated, what a falling off in the evidence.

B. They found in the Claimant a congenital brown mark on the side; but they could only assert or imagine a similar mark in Tichborne. No viva voce evidence by eye-witnesses to anything of the sort.

C. They proved, by Dr. Wilson, a peculiar formation in the Claimant; but instead of proving by some doctor, surgeon, or eye-witness a similar formation in Tichborne, they went off into wild inferences. The eccentric woman, who kept her boy three years under a seton, had also kept him a long time in frocks; and the same boy, when a moody young man, had written despondent phrases, such as, in all other cases, imply a dejected mind, but here are to be perverted to indicate a malformed body, although many doctors, surgeons, and nurses knew Tichborne's body, and not one of all these ever saw this malformation which, in the nude body, must have been visible fifty yards off. In short, the coincidences B. and C. were proved incidences with unproved "Co's."

Failing to establish a double coincidence of congenital features or marks, the Claimant went off into artificial skin-marks. Examples: Roger had marks of a seton; the Claimant showed marks of a similar kind.

Roger had a cut at the back of his head, and another on his wrist. So had the Claimant.

Roger had the seams of a lancet on his ankles. The Claimant came provided with punctures on the ankle.

Roger winked and blinked. So did the Claimant.

Then there was something about a mark on the eyelid; but on this head I forget whether the Claimant's witness ever

faced cross-examination. Nor does it very much matter, for all these artificial coincidences are rotten at the core: unlike the one true corporeal coincidence the Claimant proved, they could all be imitated; and, as regards the ankles, imitation was reasonably suspected in court, for the Claimant's needlepricks were unlike the seam of a lancet, and were not applied to the ankle pulse, as they would have been, by a surgeon, on lean Tichborne, in whom the saphena vein would be manifest, and even the ankle-pulse perceptible, though not in a fair, fat, and false representative. Then the seton marks were stiffly disputed, and the balance of medical testimony was that the Claimant's marks were not of that precise character.

These doubtful coincidences were also encountered by direct dissidences on the same line of observation. Roger was bled in the temporal artery, and the Claimant showed no puncture there. Roger was tattooed with a crown, cross, and anchor by a living witness, who faced cross-examination, and several witnesses in the cause saw the tattoo marks at various times; and it was no answer to all this positive evidence to bring witnesses who did not tattoo him, and other witnesses who never saw the tattoo marks. The pickpocket, who brought twenty witnesses that did not see him pick a certain pocket, against two who did, was defeated by the intrinsic nature of evidence. I shall ask no person to receive any coincidence from me that was so shaken and made doubtful, and also neutralised by dissidences, as the imitable skin-marks in this case were. But the Claimant also opened a large vein of apparent coincidences in the knowledge shown by him at certain times and places of numerous men and things known to Roger Tichborne. These were very remarkable. He knew private matters known to Tichborne and A, to Tichborne and B, to Tichborne and C, &c., and he knew more about Tichborne than either A, B, C, &c., individually knew. It is not fair nor reasonable to pooh-pooh this. But the defendants met this fairly; they said these coincidences were not arrived at by his being Tichborne, but by his pumping various individuals who knew Tichborne: and they applied fair and sagacious tests to the matter.

They urged as a general truth that Tichborne in Australia would have known just as much about himself, his relations, and his affairs as he subsequently knew in England. And I must do them the justice to say this position is impregnable. Then they went into detail and proved that when Gibbs first spotted the Claimant at Wagga-Wagga, he was as ignorant as

dirt of Tichborne matters; did not know the Christian names of Tichborne's mother, nor the names of the Tichborne estates, nor the counties where they lay. They then showed the steps by which his ignorance might have been partly lessened and much knowledge picked up; they showed a lady, who longed to be deceived, and all but said so, putting him by letter on to Bogle-Bogle startled, and pumped-the Claimant showing the upper part of his face in Paris to the lady who wanted to be deceived, and, after recognition on those terms, pumping her largely; then coming to England with a large stock of fact thus obtained, and in England pumping Carter, Bulpitt, and others, searching Lloyd's, &c.

2. Having proved the gradual growth of knowledge in the Claimant between Wagga-Wagga and the Court of Common Pleas, they took him in court with all his acquired knowledge, and cross-examined him on a vast number of things well-known to Tichborne. Under this test, for which his preparations were necessarily imperfect, he betrayed a mass of ignorance on a multitude of things familiar to Roger Tichborne, and he betrayed it not frankly as honest men betray ignorance, or oblivion of what they have once really known, but in spite of such fencing, evading, shuffling, and equivocating, as the most experienced have rarely seen in the witness-box. Personating a gentleman he shuffled without a blush; personating a collegian, he did not know what a quadrangle is. The inscription over the Stonyhurst quadrangle, " Laus Deo," was strange to him. He thought it meant something about the laws of God. He knew no French, no Latin. He thought Cæsar was a Greek: and, when a crucial test was offered him, which, if he had been Tichborne, he would have welcomed with delight, and turned the scale in his favour, when a thoughtful comment by Roger Tichborne on the character of René was submitted to him, and he was questioned about this René, he was utterly flabbergasted. He wriggled and writhed, and brazened out his ignorance, but it shone forth in spite of him. He was evidently not the man who had tasted Châteaubriand, and written a thoughtful comment on René. His mind was not that mind any more than his handwriting was that handwriting."

To judge this whole vein of coincidences, and their neutralising dissidences, the jury had now before them three streams of fact.

1. That at Wagga-Wagga the Claimant knew nothing about Tichborne more than the advertisements told him.

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