lobster, on which the Jesuit is mounted, carries a book in each claw;
the young prince's head is decorated with a windmill. All these intimate
the influence of Father Petre upon the proceedings of James II, and of
the Jesuits in general in the imposition, as was by many supposed, of
the pretended prince. The imputation upon the legitimacy of the young
child was occasioned in a great degree, and almost justified, by the
pilgrimages and superstitious fooleries of his grandmother, increased by
his mother's choosing St. Francis Xavier as one of her ecclesiastical
patrons, and with her family attributing the birth of the prince to his
miraculous interference. This may have provoked the opposers of popery
to take every means of satirising the Jesuits; and the following
circumstances related in the _Life of Xavier_ probably suggested the
idea of making the lobster one of the symbols of the superstitions and
impositions of the Jesuits, and a means of discrediting the birth of the
prince by ridiculing the community by whose impositions they asserted
the fraud to have been contrived and executed.

The account is given by a Portuguese, called Fausto Rodriguez, who was a
witness of the fact, has deposed it upon oath, and whose juridical
testimony is in the process of the Saint's canonization.

"'We were at sea,' says Rodriguez, 'Father Francis, John Raposo, and
myself, when there arose a tempest which alarmed all the mariners.
Then the Father drew from his bosom a little crucifix, which he
always carried about him, and leaning over deck, intended to have
dipt it into the sea; but the crucifix dropt out of his hand, and
was carried off by the waves. This loss very sensibly afflicted him,
and he concealed not his sorrow from us. The next morning we landed
on the Island of Baranura; from the time when the crucifix was lost,
to that of our landing, it was near twenty-four hours, during which