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The Mandingoes, in particular, are a very gentle race, cheerful in their dispositions, inquisitive, credulous, simple, and fond of flattery. Perhaps the most prominent defect in their character was that insurmountable propensity, which the reader must have observed to prevail in all classes of them, to steal from me the few effects I was possessed of.
But there were enough of those credulous folk that delight in the miraculous, who believed fully in this marvellous conversion, and never tired of discussing the wonder. And so Ned went about, posing as a brand snatched from the burning, to the amusement of one-half the town, the admiration of the other half, and the curiosity of both.
The constant repetition acted on the minds of the people as a sufficient proof of the charge; and the denials, the protestations, the appeals to heaven made by the king, were disregarded and condemned as unworthy artifices, adopted to deceive the credulous and unwary.
They had a long time of waiting to get over through the still summer night, but still Rob was strangely excited, wondering whether Sandy had really, in pottering about, discovered a new indication of the whereabouts of the herring, or whether he was to go back to Erisaig in the morning with empty nets. There was another thing too. Had he shown himself too credulous before his companions?
"Curse upon all priests!" said the other indignantly; "they are all the same; a crew of cunning scoundrels, who attempt to subjugate the ignorant and the credulous to their sway; a pack of spiritual swindlers, who get possession of the consciences of the people through pious fraud, and then make slavish instruments of them for their own selfish purposes.
Camden, who is not credulous in matters like these, affords his countenance to the story of his coinage of nobles; and there is nothing at all wonderful in the fact of a man famous for his knowledge of metals being employed in such a capacity. Raymond was, at this time, an old man, in his seventy-seventh year, and somewhat in his dotage.
Time and again, when some credulous one had lifted his voice in honest support of a silly superstition, I had jeered him into a grumbled, shamefaced disavowal. Once I sat in the graveyard at midnight, in the full of the moon, just to convince Ira Spoonholler that his grandfather was keeping close to his proper plot.
He still saw him in his memory, just as he had imagined him in the credulous illusions of boyhood, bending men to his will; able to send some to the gallows and pardoning others according to his caprice; seated at the table of monarchs and playing cards with them, just as Pèp himself might do with a crony in the tavern at San José; addressing one another by the familiar "thou"; and when he was not in the court city, he was an absolute seignior in vessels of iron the kind that spit smoke and cannon balls.
My readers may perhaps be inclined to smile, when I mention among the causes of Napoleon's elevation, the use made by him of ballad-singers, newsmongers, pedlars, &c. But really, on a deliberate view of his system of juggling and deception, I am inclined to believe, that it was one of his most powerful engines. The people of France are not only the most vain, but the most credulous in the world.
"Oh! desolate people," exclaimed he, in a voice of piercing woe, "too credulous of fair speeches, and not aware of the calamities which are coming upon you! Call to remembrance the miseries you have suffered, and start, before it be too late, from this last snare of your oppressor! Have I yet to tell ye that his embrace is death? Oh! look yet to Heaven and ye shall find a rescue!"
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