Americans. The reason of its utility is to be found in the very great abundance of that quality, which it so effectually designates; for though there have been lying and hypocrisy, no doubt, in all ages, yet this is par excellence the age of humbugthe age in which semblance is all in all, and the name of virtue is more prized, because more profitable, than the reality. How many popular delusions have followed each other during the last few years! There was the Cholera humbug, which, after it had filled the pockets of the doctors, quietly vanished, and was heard of no more. Then there was the Reform humbug, that was to put a goose on every man's table, and a butt of ale in his cellar; when lo, and behold! the only geese were the poor fools who had believed in it. Next there was the Anti-slavery humbug, and a pretty piece of humbug it was; a whole nation went mad to free a parcel of blacks, when their own white children were enduring a slavery ten times more severe in the factories at home. Then there was a prodigious splutter about the morals of the people, whereupon the gin palaces were redoubled in number, George Colman was appointed to look after our theatrical peccadillos, and Lord Lyndhurst, for whose talents we have the highest respect, notwithstanding this vagary, resolved, that for a man to marry the sister of a deceased wife was a crime; thus, what was not a relationship of blood in 1835 became so in 1836, by the mere fiat of an individual, who had in this made a discovery far beyond Harvey's circulations of the same fluid. I think, however, I could recommend some other trifles to the consideration of his lordship, wherein his pre-eminent genius might render incalculable advantages to the public. But, after all, law is, and always has been, our greatest humbug, and being bad enough in itself, but made yet worse by its application, the dispensers of it, wholesale and retail, act much upon the same principle as your physicians and your surgeons, the medicus proportioning the dose to the strength of the patient's body, but the legal practitioner considering only the strength of the victim's purse. If, for instance, a rich man wishes for a divorce from his better half, the case being sufficiently approved, he may obtain it; but as a man without money must also be without honour, and without feeling, this luxury, of course, is denied to him. Again, if a strong VOL. X.—NO. II.—FEBRUARY, 1837.

brute wishes to horsewhip his weaker neighbour, he knows the exact price of his amusement; the fine that would punish, by ruining, a poor man, is in his case only so much outlay for so much pleasure. Verily this justice is a terrible humbug!

The Ladies in the House of Commons.Some chivalrous Honourable-for in the Commons they are all like the conspirators against Cæsar, all honourable men;-some chivalrous Honourable last Session took it into his head that it would mightily mend the manners of the disputants if the ladies were to superintend the debates. Now I do not mean to deny that the manners of the Honourables may be very much in want of amendment, but I question, and not a little, the efficacy of the proposed mode of amelioration. If a gallery were filled with ladies, would their presence make Joseph Hume talk, think, or look, like a gentleman? or would Alderman Wood be thereby influenced into uttering a word of sense in one of his half-hour orations? or would a cidevant sheriff be a jot the more rational? Great as is the female influence, I doubt its reaching to an extent like this; a woman might wrest the drawn sword from Napoleon, as formerly she had wrested it from the hands of Marc Antony, but to civilise in-born vulgarity, protected by a rind of fifty years' growth, or to quicken stupidity into genius, are wonders beyond even her power. Besides, is the House of Commons a mere arena for a set of talkers to show how well they can gossip about nothing, or is it the great council of the nation? If it be the latter, I humbly conceive the ladies are as much out of place as they would be in the field of battle.

The Pawnbrokers.—A Mr. Manning has undertaken to teach the pawnbrokers a little more honesty in their dealings; and, if he has not succeeded in that laudable design, he has at least administered, by the aid of the magistrates, some wholesome castigation in the shape of fines. But the pawnbrokers were far from kissing the rod that smote them; on the contrary, the ungrateful varlets appealed to the quarter sessions, and engaged Heaven knows how many gentlemen in wigs and gowns, to prove that they had a right to take more than the act allowed. Adolphus talked, and Clarkson talked, proving to all intents and purposes that a farthing was not a farthing; and then Curwood talked to prove that it was, and Jemmett talked to

M

the same effect; and then the magistrates talked ;-never was so much talking to so little purpose. The Court all the time was crowded with the gentlemen of the three balls, who winked and nodded, and looked unutterable things, while their friends the Jews smiled upon Mr. Adolphus as if he had been some portion of the promised land. By the bye, how happens it that the chosen people have left so much of the pawnbroking trade to the Christians? -surely it is a great oversight.

Bells. It is really astonishing that a set of civilized beings, endowed with the gift of hearing, should have so long submitted to this intolerable nuisance. In the morning, the dustman fairly rings you out of the streets by his tintinabulary clatter; and this pleasant pursuit he carries on till he is relieved by the postman, dunning with his bell for pennies. He again is followed by the shrill tink-tink of the muffin-boys. Worse than all comes Sunday, when some thousand bells are all in voice at the same time, from the big bom-bom of St. Paul's to the shrill brayings of the inferior steeples. This is really too bad : surely people know their way to church as well as to the theatre. A bell may be requisite to lead sheep, but it can scarcely be necessary for that enlightened gentleman, Mr. Bull. The worst of this nuisance is, that, like death, there is no escaping from it; it is the atra cura of Horace go where you will it follows you, except, indeed, you descend into a coal-pit or a copper-mine. Talk of tithes indeed! the poor old lady must be fed like other folks; but, as a dutiful and loving son, I must pray her to have some mercy upon

our ears.

The English Opera.-I use this phrase to designate a thing which does not, and never has existed in this country, but which poor Bishop is very anxious to create. For this purpose, three things only are wanteda theatre, a composer, and singers. The licenser is willing to grant a patent for the first, whenever the applicants can raise the sum of fifty thousand pounds; Bishop and Barnett are no doubt intended to supply the second deficiency; and the third-why we must make shift for the present with what we have, and, in the due course of time, it is to be hoped that we shall have our Devrients, our Grisis, and our Tamburinis. In the mean while, how does Mr.

Bishop intend to support his establishment, even supposing that the nice conscience of the Chamberlain is satisfied by the visible and tangible appearance of fifty thousand pounds? The few who really understand and like opera, in the real meaning of the word, are not likely to leave the King's Theatre and the Opera Buffa for anything that English talent can at present offer. In the first place it is, as it always has been, fashionable to prefer foreign to home-bred talent; in the next-though it makes against a cause that I would willingly advocate-we have no means of competing at present with these foreign importations. If Mr. Bishop avoids Charybdis on this side, he will fall into Scylla on the other; or, in other words, in seeking to gain an English audience, he must have recourse to an English amusement, and that is not opera; ibi omnis effusus labor, or, in homely English, he may take his labour for his pains. Still it is a scheme that ought to succeed; had there been such a theatre in Bishop's younger days, we should now have a composer who would fairly rank with the Rossinis and the Webers.

Good and Evil.-I question much if good is anything else but the golden mean, while evil is the extreme of the same act or quality. Thus health is a good; the extreme is plethora, an evil. Courage is good; the extreme again is rashness, an evil. Religion is good; but the extreme, or superstition, is evil; and so on through all the various phases of human existence. Now, if some worthy folks would take this doctrine to heart and act upon it, there would be much ease to themselves as well as to their neighbours; Dr. Morison, as he calls himself, would not order his patients to swallow more than a hundred, or within two hundred, pills in' the course of the day; the gentle Commissioners of the Insolvent Court would be less liberal in dealing out their allowances of imprisonment to poor debtors; the Tories would have less obstinacy and more prudence; the Whigs less talk and more sincerity; the Radicals less violence and more patriotism; the drinkers of gin would not exceed their three or four pints at a sitting, and consequently their neighbours would walk the streets with less danger to their persons; et cætera, et cætera, to the end of a chapter as long and as dry as the tragedy of “Ion.”

Of all the writers, ancient or modern, with whom we are acquainted, Madame de Genlis has always appeared to us to be the most insincere and affected. Her life which, like Rousseau, she was shameless enough to publish-developed a spirit of immorality that influenced even its minutest particulars; her writings, on the contrary, are full of strained sentimentality, mawkish professions of a love of virtue, exaggerated admiration of truth, and a morbid enthusiasm in the defence of religion. Nor is this all; the mistress of one prince felt herself under a divine obligation to praise every other prince that fell within the reach of her pen, and accordingly we find in her books that servile adulation of royalty which is most offensive to the most noble order of minds. She could discover nothing to censure in a monarch or his flatterers; she knelt in degrading worship before the robe of majesty, and was well pleased to dedicate her soul to its service, if she were but permitted to touch its train. That such a woman should ever have made an impression upon the reading world is a marvel: that the false morals of her works should not have been detected long ago is still more inexplicable: but that the discrepancy between her actions and her writings should not have been exposed, and the hypocrisy of her nature laid bare, surprises us still more than that her readers should have been deceived by her affectation of purity. There never was an author who vitiated history with so thorough a disregard for probability, who openly exhibited so much contempt for authorities that were in every body's hands, or who betrayed so little conscientiousness in attributing to public characters qualities the very reverse of those by which they were really distinguished. Although she cannot be said to have originated in France what is called the "Historical Romance," which existed in a higher state of perfection before she invaded its precincts, yet the popularity of her name helped to give a wider circulation to the fables which she published under that title than any of her predecessors had succeeded in pro

curing for similar fabrications. The amount of the mischief she accomplished in this way was considerable. Her stories, recommended by their plausibility, their injurious intermixture of fact and fiction, their dramatic vivacity, and assumption of moral feeling, were read with avidity; and thus not only her false sentiments were diffused through society, but her dangerous misrepresentations of historical facts. To a writer, so destitute of the first elements of probity and consistency, the intrinsic repulsiveness of a subject presented no objection, provided it had a tendency to flatter the court. Having, with unblushing candour, transferred to print the depravities of her own life, she did not hesitate to select from the annals of Versailles their most painful and humiliating scenes, to embellish them with meretricious eloquence, and even to extol the vices that she laboured to convert into merits. The guilty courtezan-the royal betrayer—were painted by Madame de Genlis like fallen angels, whose nature, darkened in a moment of weakness, still preserved its radiant purity in all its original freshness. It was not her province to show the punishment of those pleasant sins that filled the palace with unrighteous delights; she preferred casting a veil over conscience, and exhibiting only the face of seductive smiles that, with the accustomed levity of professional deception, contradicted the agonies of the breaking heart. The histories of the mistresses of Louis XIV. were appropriate themes for so unscrupulous a genius. In the young beauty and premature ruin of Louise de la Vallière, and the more orderly fall of Madame de Maintenon, she found ample excuses for the invocation of that erring sympathy which she loved to engender and awaken. She understood, with the accuracy of instinct, the whole course of their thoughts—their sophistry-their violations of rectitude in the name of the desecrated affections-their disguise of charity—their impudent mask of religion-their repentant retirementand their theatrical sacrifices. Besides there was the dissolute court-the galaxy of

wits the gorgeous revels-the heartless pomp-the wonders of that palatial magnificence, which eclipsed the inventions of the East, and rivalled the elaborate splendours of the Alhambra―a fortunate and a renowned monarch-an abused queenand an age of back-stairs' adventures. These were temptations not to be resisted: and she chose her degraded heroines, with a full sense of the accessories of the scene, and a clear resolution to elevate the whole into the fascinating regions of romance, at any cost of plain truth and obvious morality. Her courage was at least as conspicuous as her contempt for facts. In her preface to her lives—or nouvelletes—of the Duchess de la Vallière and Madame de Maintenon, she was bold enough to say, "of one thing I am certain, that this work contains nothing dangerous, and that its morality is pure, since it is drawn from the only real source of virtue and truth." Agreeably to her system of ethics, the real source of virtue and truth is the poisoned spring of passion. Unsullied love-strong in its innocence unembittered by selfreproaches free from selfishness, from unlawful desires, and base ambition, would not have been sufficiently exciting for the morbid sensibilities of Madame de Genlis. But it was impossible for such a woman to appreciate the sweetness, gentleness, the enduring beauty and repose of the chaste and confiding Affections!

The story of Louise de la Vallièrewhich was rendered notorious by the artificial narrative of Madame de Genlis, which, we regret to find, has been recently epublished in England—is known to all our readers. She was one of the victims of Louis XIV., a monarch whose character has rarely been described at its natural height of heartlessness. Educated in retirement, her mind was weak and superstitious; and called at an early age to the most brilliant court in Europe, it was not surprising that a young and beautiful woman, whose heart was filled with visions such as occupy the day-dreams of enthusiasts, who are uninfluenced by fixed principles, should have been enthralled by the flattering attentions of the king. Louis XIV. possessed so many attractions, personal and accidental-he had so noble an exterior, so rich a flow of eloquence, was so gracious in his bearing, so magnificent in his style, so flushed with triumphs, and so exalted by the atmosphere of intellect

in the midst of which he moved that his conquest of the trembling, susceptible, and dazzled girl was not a matter to excite much wonder. The times in which he lived might have intoxicated a more experienced dweller in courts than the infatuated beauty. The age of Bossuet and Fenelon the apochryphal priests of a Papal church which they almost protestantized-of Pascal, Boileau, and La Fontaine, the age over which Madame de Sévigné shed the enchantments of her inexhaustible wit, her playful fancy, her satire, and her mirth, the age of scandalous memoirs and piquant disclosures, of a lax faith and equivocal morality, was the very time when such profanations might be supposed to be more frequent, to contain less pathos in their results, and to have in their progress less of the fragrant essence of poetry than, perhaps, any other period in the records of history. We are not here called upon to discuss the character of Louis XIV., to show that the gallant lover was as arrogant as he was treacherous, that royalty was in him pampered into despotism, or to point to the revocation of the edict of Nantz on the one hand, while we disclose on the other the exulting magnificence of Versailles. His character is in the hands of the historian;-in this slight sketch it appears in only one of its ostentatious phases.

The course of the royal wooing was rapid. Louise was no sooner won, than Louis wearied of her charms, and the artful Madame de Montespan found no difficulty in supplanting her, to be afterwards herself supplanted by the more wary and skilful Maintenon-the most respectable of the three. In her despair, Louise exchanged the court for a convent, after a brief effort of shame on the part of Louis to dissuade her from her purpose. These are the whole materials of the story: concise enough, common enough, and, we may add, repulsive enough to be permitted to pass away silently into oblivion. But a morbid taste has restored them to the publicity which they originally acquired from the elevation of the persons involved in them, and Mr. Bulwer-in whom something of the spirit of Madame de Genlis appears to be regenerated-has tested their pathetic qualities by an appeal to the stage.

It is not necessary to observe that the catastrophe of a play, founded upon such

circumstances, must inevitably disappoint the feelings of the audience; for it is a universal principle in mankind to desire the triumph of virtue, and the punishment of vice. Whatever may be the extent of individual transgressions, or the indifference with which individuals violate truth and justice themselves, the world in its collective capacity sympathizes only with the innocent and the oppressed. It would be impossible, by the exercise of the most consummate art, to draw down the pity of an audience upon a hypocrite or an assassin, or to excite an interest in the distresses of a character whose bad passions had wrought self-ruin. Yet Mr. Bulwer selected for the subject of his first dramatic essay a story in which-so far as the facts on which it is founded are concerned-the pathos turns chiefly on the misfortunes of a rejected mistress. An attempt so hazardous as this could not, of course, have even a faint chance of success if the heroine were to be delineated exactly as she was, in all the deformity of her guilt: and, therefore, in order to invest her with some claims upon the generosity of the spectator, he has softened her errors down into that sort of frailty which is thought to be akin to virtue, and endeavoured to absorb her

faults in a halo of intense devotion. On a

mere principle of taste, this is fatal to the play; for neither the excessive delicacy of portraiture, nor the deep womanly truth that clings even in despair to the object of its idolatry, can conceal the primary vice, out of the consequences of which the whole interest arises. The main fact admits of no equivocation: it cannot be modified or evaded : nor has the dramatist taken any pains to obscure it, but has brought it forward into the most prominent light by tracing the three eras of Louise de la Vallière's life her early innocence-her fall-her remorse. Thus we are compelled to look upon the ruin, which is heightened before our eyes by the force of the strong contrasts in which it is placed between the confiding simplicity of youth, and the mental sufferings of a premature decline. But the morality is worse than the taste. The character of Louise is consecrated by the charms of abiding tenderness, of still and patient reliance, of deep emotion, and feminine sweetness. These embellishments are employed as palliatives: and the error is excused in the person of the erring. She is a poetical sophistication-more false than

Mrs. Haller, and more dangerous than Calista. In the former there is a life of practical atonement-in the latter overwhelming and retributive punishment-in Louise, the guilt is followed by an act of dedication which loses the terrors of a sacrifice in the repose of hope to which it leads. In taking this estimate of the capabilities of the story, Mr. Bulwer has filled up with bolder colours the sketch of Madame de Genlis. His Mademoiselle de la Vallière is the same loveable and innocent being, full of pure aspirations, and inspired by ardent affections: and, although he does not follow his prototype to the tranquil death of his heroine in the arms of her daughter, he assigns her to a destiny still more consoling and satisfactory. He admits her dereliction with reluctance, and makes her proud lover, the chivalric Bragelone, describe her as one in whom origiginal purity still dwelt

The angel has not left her !-if the plumes

Have lost the whiteness of their younger glory,
The wings have still the instinct of the skies,
And yet shall bear her up!

This is the moral of the play: you must sympathize with the beautiful delinquent, if you would enjoy the tender sadness of her fate you must rejoice in her heavenward destination, if you would do full justice to

her deserts. Goldsmith would have treated

this subject differently: his morality was of another cast. Of the lost one he says,

The only art her guilt to cover,

To hide her shame from every eye, To give repentance to her lover, And wring his bosom is-to die! But these are trite lines, that would furnish but a sorry hint for the Anglo-French drama of our times.

That the crowds who gather in our theatres may tolerate these violations of moral truth, for the sake of the art with which they are sometimes conducted, does not diminish the weight of the fact, that they are regarded with censure by the public. The sentence may be slow in coming, but it is sure to come at last. Such plays cannot survive the temporary curiosity they excite: when the first gaze is gratified they are set aside. The most energetic dialogue, the most refined spirit of poetry, cannot rescue them from ultimate condemnation.

In the construction of the play, Mr. Bulwer has been equally unfortunate: a defect that is quite as visible to the ordinary playgoer as to the most rigid critic. The rules of art are not such mysteries as simple