like the lost Sebastian, he had been got hold of
by the knight and the bishop, and persuaded to
act the part of the prince redivivus. He did
not succeed, but got sent to the galleys for life,
while the bishop was hanged for a treasonable
plotter as he was. Of the knight's future not
much seems to be known. After him came
Gonçalo Alvarez, the son of a mason, who
generously granted the title of Earl of Torres Novas
to a rich yeoman whose daughter he wanted to
marry—raised a body of men, and gave the
government a few days of anxiety. He was
soon disposed of, like the rest; but under a
severer sentence, as he had been more troublesome
than they. He was hanged and quartered,
and the Earl of Torres Novas was
deprived of his dignity and estate, and left
shivering in social nakedness, exposed to the
ridicule of the world. But twenty years after
the battle of Alcaçar, namely, in 1598, came
one, about whom history is even yet undecided—
a kingly-looking man, noble in spite of poverty
and the deep lines of suffering like scars across
his face—who presented himself at Venice, saying
that he was Sebastian, so long thought to
have been slain at Alcaçar, but who had been
taken prisoner by the Moors instead, and kept in
close ward for all these weary waiting twenty
years. He gave a very likely and detailed
account of himself when examined by the Venetian
nobles deputed to try him, and showed great
firmness, piety, and patience, as might have
been expected from a prince who had been so
severely tried; he knew all the secrets of the
palace and the royal family; was exceedingly
like what the true Sebastian would have been
after twenty years of affliction and privation;
had all the bodily marks and personal
peculiarities of the prince; and was, in short, so
dangerously possible, that the Portuguese
authorities were uneasy, and got him ordered out of
Venice, afraid to have him any longer in public
view. When banished from the Queen of the
Adriatic he went to the Queen of the Plains,
and took refuge in Florence. But the grand-
duke gave him up to Count de Lemos, the
viceroy of Naples, by whom he was imprisoned
in the Castle d'Ovo, every now and then brought
forth and exhibited to the people—the officer in
charge of the exhibition crying out, "This is
the man who calls himself Sebastian!" "And
I am Sebastian," would sometimes answer the
patient, proud, and kingly-looking prisoner.
From d'Ovo he was sent to the galleys, thence
to San Lucar, and thence to a castle in Castile,
where he disappeared from history, and no one
ever knew what became of him. If he was not
the true Sebastian, he was the most remarkable
of all the false presentments to be found in
history.

Of false Demetriuses in Russia there were
many. Demetrius, the son of John Basilowitz,
Czar or Grand-Duke of Muscovy, had
been murdered by the order of Boris Gudenow
in the early part of 1600. But it was found
convenient for certain men to say that he had
not been murdered, and if there was a likeness
anywhere, it was made the most of. The
most famous of the false Demetriuses was the
monk Otrafief, a fine, brave, handsome fellow,
run off the same jacquard loom as the slain
prince, who gathered together a large army
with which he defeated his enemy Boris Gudenow,
who thereupon killed himself, as the best
thing he could do for mankind. Otrafief was
crowned at Moscow by the name of Demetrius
the Fourth, or Fifth, as historians choose to
recognise or ignore that other Demetrius some
three hundred years before him, and began his
reign so well, that even those who thought
within themselves, and those who knew for
certain, that he was only a shabby monk and
no Demetrius at all, held their tongues, finding
the new state of things quite sufficiently to their
liking to buy their silence. But usurpers seldom
prosper. In a short time, Demetrius Otrafief
gave way to such cruelties and excesses that
mankind, as embodied in the Muscovites of
1605, could bear him no longer. On the day of
his marriage with the daughter of the Vaywode
of Sendimir, one of his first and most
influential adherents, a party of conspirators burst
into the palace and slew him; and then the fact
was publicly proclaimed that he was only the
monk Otrafief, and no more the true son of
John Basilowitz than Boris Gudenow himself.
Then, in 1773, one Pougatschoff must needs give
himself out as Peter the Third, whom the imperial
Catherine had good reason to know was
sleeping safely his last sleep, carefully put out
of her royal way. He seized the fortresses in
the county or district of Orenburg, assembled a
goodly army, and might have given the royal
murderess no end of trouble had he not been
betrayed by some of his followers, and given up
to the enemy. He was put into an iron cage,
and so carried to Moscow, where he was first
shown in derision to the people as a bad likeness
of the dead Peter, and then executed,
January, 1775. Yet he was a counterfeit presentment
of no such very grotesque forms, and
quite sufficiently like the original to deceive
men with more faith than discernment.

Of the false Dauphins who have troubled
France since the death of poor little "Louis
Capet," we have not much to say. They were
rather impostors and adventurers than counterfeit
presentments, none of whom were very
successful in their attempts, and none of any special
mark or political significance. The chief person
worried by them was the poor Duchesse
d'Angoulême, with whom they all, naturally
enough, claimed relationship and knowledge.
For the rest, they were only laughed at by the
public, and locked up when they became too
intrusive and annoying.

But some of the strangest instances of this
double likeness are to be found in private life;
and the history of the false Martin Guerre is
one of the strangest of all. In the middle of
the sixteenth century one Martin Guerre, aged
eleven, was married to Bertrande de Hols, aged
seven, both of Artigues, a little village near
Rieux, the "chef lieu" of Haute Garonne. In