I have also not the smallest doubt that this endurance or
affronting of fearful images is partly associated with indecency, partly
with general fatuity and weakness of mind. The men who applauded loudest
when the actress put on, in an instant, her mask representing a skull,
and when her sharp and clear "Sono la Morte" rang through the theatre,
were just those whose disgusting habits rendered it impossible for women
to pass through some of the principal streets in Venice,--just those who
formed the gaping audience, when a mountebank offered a new quack
medicine on the Riva dei Schiavoni. And, as fearful imagery is
associated with the weakness of fever, so it seems to me that imbecility
and love of terror are connected by a mysterious link throughout the
whole life of man. There is a most touching instance of this in the last
days of Sir Walter Scott, the publication of whose latter works, deeply
to be regretted on many accounts, was yet, perhaps, on the whole,
right, as affording a means of studying the conditions of the decay of
overwrought human intellect in one of the most noble of minds. Among the
many signs of this decay at its uttermost, in Castle Dangerous, not one
of the least notable was the introduction of the knight who bears on his
black armor the likeness of a skeleton.

Sec. 16. The love of horror which is in this manner connected with
feebleness of intellect, is not, however, to be confounded with that
shown by the vulgar in general. The feeling which is calculated upon in
the preparation of pieces full of terror and crime, at our lower
theatres, and which is fed with greater art and elegance in the darker
scenery of the popular French novelists, however morally unhealthy, is
not _unnatural_; it is not the result of an apathy to such horror, but
of a strong desire for excitement in minds coarse and dull, but not
necessarily feeble. The scene of the murder of the jeweller in the
"Count of Monte Cristo," or those with the Squelette in the "Mysteres de
Paris," appeal to instincts which are as common to all mankind as those
of thirst and hunger, and which are only debasing in the exaggerated
condition consequent upon the dulness of other instincts higher than
they. And the persons who, at one period of their life, might take chief
pleasure in such narrations, at another may be brought into a temper of
high tone and acute sensibility. But the love of horror respecting which
we are now inquiring appears to be an