The Sun.
London, England, 1854-04-11 00:00:00

THE SUN, LONDON, TUESDAY EVENING, APRIL ll, 1854!

plete manner in which the crime was brought
home to the impostor !
Mr. PROVIS played for no trifling stake. He
would have reaped a rich reward had he succeeded
in his deception. A title of ninety years' stand-
ing, and that but the revival of one more than
a century older, with a handsome mansion, and
some 30,000/. sterling per annum to support
the dignity with, was not to be despised ! These
accessories were surely enough to stimulate the
invention and. keep steady to his tale the car-
penter's son, and the convicted horse-stealer. But
the miraculous part of the transaction is, that he
should have obtained so many dupes—not merely
ignorant persons, who might be deceived by the
boldness of his assertions, but keen-witted attor-
neys, and close-fisted capitalists, who are said to
have advanced the funds necessary for bringing
his claim forward, and placing it clearly before the
public. When he succeeded so far, is it surpris-
ing that he should have speculated still further
on human credulity, or deemed it not impractic-
able to bamboozle even a British Judge and Jury,
or possibly a Secretary of State, even after the
final decision of the Jury had been arrived
at ? It would otherwise be impossible to account
for his obstinate persisiance in the fictitious tale,
even to the very last moment, and his insulting
observations to several of the witnesses. He
would otherwise have made a merit of necessity,
and, like URIAII HEAP, have exhibited an affected
penitence, which might possibly have mitigated
his punishment.

But he must have been himself as credulous
as he was audacious. He must have formed a
very, humble estimate of the intellects of those
before whom he was to appear, if he conceived it
possible to avoid the penal consequences of his de-
ception. His ignorance of the commonest prin-
ciples of orthography his fatal error re-
specting the .duplication of the consonants,
which became so .manifest upon the investigation
of the fraud, and which occasioned similar mistakes
in the spurious document, and other papers,
acknowledged to be from his pen and in his hand-
writing, afforded a strong presumption of his
guilt. The fact that the alleged will was written
on parchment manufactured under a process not
discovered until several years after the death of
testator, proved that it could not have been
genuine by any possibility ; and although the
ignorance of the claimant might have induced
him to overlook-the obvious detection that awaited
him on these points, it is difficult to conceive
how he could have ventured putting fcinVarcl the
portrait of his own brother JOHN, who died at
sea, as the:likeness of Sir HUGH SMYTH, who had
been living within the last thirty years, and
whose lineaments must, therefore, have been
familiar to many persons whose attention would
necessarily be called by the circumstances, and
who would be induced to examine the alleged
portrait—that portrait, too, which was so well
known to
,all the frequenters of old PROVIS'S
house. Stranger still was the notion that the
Bible which he had purchased a short time pre-
viously, with the name " JOHN S. VANDEN-
RURGH," should not be identified, or that the re-
spectable tradesman who had engraved the seal
should not hear of the transaction, and come for-
ward as he did to denounce the forger.
The value of the recently adopted principle of
examining the parties to a suit was clearly estab-
lished. THOMAS PROiTIS condemned himself out
of his own mouth, and the . journals which
circulated his statements throughout the length
and breadth of the land insured his detection.
It was on reading the report of the proceedings
that the party by whom the inscriptions on the
ring, &c., had been engraved, sent the telegraphic
message which brought the trial to a summary
conclusion, and ultimately led to the banishment
of the offender for twenty years a merciful
sentence when we consider the magnitude of the
fraud, and the- enormous expense to which the
real inheritor was subjected by the impudent
claim. Earlier in the century he would have
expiated his enormous guilt by an ignominious
• death on the scaffold. We believe, however, that
twenty years' .oxile will be quite effectual in pre-
venting the exauiPle—tet by the would-be aristo-
crat from being followed, for it is the certainty of
detection rather than the severity of the punish-
ment that is found to be effectual for the repres-
a .sion of crime.