wit, unless the wounded can retort with
success by a similar weapon, or that the attack has been so obvious
that he is justified in resenting it by a less poetical one. Hence
arises a difficult position for him on whom a wit is pleased to
exercise his talent; and this is one of the many reasons why privileged
persons seldom add much to the harmony of society.

Went last night to the Porte St. Martin, and saw _Sept Heures_
represented. This piece has excited a considerable sensation at Paris;
and the part of the heroine, "Charlotte Corday," being enacted by
Madame Dorval, a very clever actress, it is very popular.

"Charlotte Corday" is represented in the piece, not as a heroine
actuated purely by patriotic motives in seeking the destruction of a
tyrant who inflicted such wounds on her country, but by the less
sublime one of avenging the death of her lover. This, in my opinion,
lessens the interest of the drama, and atones not for the horror always
inspired by a woman's arming herself for a scene of blood.

The taste of the Parisians has, I think, greatly degenerated, both in
their light literature and their dramas. The desire for excitement, and
not a decrease of talent, is the cause; and this morbid craving for it
will, I fear, lead to injurious consequences, not only in literature,
but in other and graver things.

The schoolmaster is, indeed, abroad in France, and has in all parts of
it found apt scholars--perhaps, too apt; and, like all such, the
digestion of what is acquired does not equal the appetite for
acquisition: consequently, the knowledge gained is as yet somewhat
crude and unavailable. Nevertheless, the people are making rapid
strides in improvement; and ignorance will soon be more rare than
knowledge formerly was.

At present, their minds are somewhat unsettled by the recentness of
their progress; and in the exuberance consequent on such a state, some
danger is to be apprehended.

Like a room from which light has been long excluded, and in which a
large window is opened, all the disagreeable objects in it so long
shrouded in darkness are so fully revealed, that the owner, becoming
impatient to remove them and substitute others in their place, often
does so at the expense of appropriateness, and crowds the chamber with
a heterogeneous _melange_ of furniture, which, however useful in
separate parts, are too incongruous to produce a good effect. So the
minds of the French people are now too enlightene