ve to, and murder, her sons, in the
"Tour de Nesle." I have seen her poison a company of no less than nine
gentlemen, at Ferrara, with an affectionate son in the number; I have
seen her, as Madame de Brinvilliers, kill off numbers of respectable
relations in the first four acts; and, at the last, be actually burned
at the stake, to which she comes shuddering, ghastly, barefooted, and in
a white sheet. Sweet excitement of tender sympathies! Such tragedies are
not so good as a real, downright execution; but, in point of interest,
the next thing to it: with what a number of moral emotions do they fill
the breast; with what a hatred for vice, and yet a true pity and respect
for that grain of virtue that is to be found in us all: our bloody,
daughter-loving Brinvilliers; our warmhearted, poisonous Lucretia
Borgia; above all, what a smart appetite for a cool supper afterwards,
at the Cafe Anglais, when the horrors of the play act as a piquant sauce
to the supper!

Or, to speak more seriously, and to come, at last, to the point. After
having seen most of the grand dramas which have been produced at Paris
for the last half-dozen years, and thinking over all that one has
seen,--the fictitious murders, rapes, adulteries, and other crimes, by
which one has been interested and excited,--a man may take leave to be
heartily ashamed of the manner in which he has spent his time; and
of the hideous kind of mental intoxication in which he has permitted
himself to indulge.

Nor are simple society outrages the only sort of crime in which the
spectator of Paris plays has permitted himself to indulge; he has
recreated himself with a deal of blasphemy besides, and has passed many
pleasant evenings in beholding religion defiled and ridiculed.

Allusion has been made, in a former paper, to a fashion that lately
obtained in France, and which went by the name of Catholic reaction; and
as, in this happy country, fashion is everything, we have had not merely
Catholic pictures and quasi religious books, but a number of Catholic
plays have been produced, very edifying to the frequenters of the
theatres or the Boulevards, who have learned more about religion from
these performances than they have acquired, no doubt, in the whole of
their lives before. In the course of a very few years we have seen--"The
Wandering Jew;" "Belshazzar's Feast;" "Nebuchadnezzar:" and the
"Massacre of the Innocents;" "Joseph and his Brethren;" "The Passage of
the Red Sea