far as they are personally concerned, little else than a detail of male and female misconduct, so abandoned, and, at the same time, so common, and so much in course, that when that pre-eminent debauchee, the Regent Duc D'Orleans, confined himself, not long before his death, to one mistress, (his wife still alive) this extraordinary case of self-denial was regarded as a virtue. "Comme si sa mort eut rompu le charme qui retenoit le Duc D'Orleans dans l'oisiveté, on le vit s'occuper des affaires, renoncer, si non au libertinage, du moins aux eclats les plus scandaleux de la debauche, se borner à un seul attachement, espece de moderation que la depravation des mœurs fait regarder chez quelques Grands, comme une vertu." (M. Anquetil. Louis XIV. sa cour et la Regent. tom. 4, p. 308. Ann. 1723.) The influence of women in the Court of France, on the character and conduct of the monarchs of that country, seems to have began with Louis XIV., and continued down to the infatuated monarch Charles X., whom an indignant people have so properly deposed. La belle Gabrielle had no influence over the politics of Henry IV., except in one instance, when she negotiated a truce with the Duke of Mentz.

It is singular that the gross immoralities of the French Court did not degrade the language or manners of the Theatre. Corneille, Moliere, Racine, are unexceptionable in this respect : indeed the ethics of these great writers, are as commendable, as the specimens of dramatic talent, by which they are accompanied and in which they are conveyed, are admirable; while the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, Congreve, Vanbrugh and others, were of a description that no flashes of wit can atone for, and no base compliance with the depraved taste of the public can in any manner excuse. It was by the stage chiefly that the infamics of the Court were made to descend among the people, and it was thus that the lasciviousness and the revelries of the fashionable world were held up to the people as mere gaietics allowable in the class of society that was, in those days, accustomed to indulge in them. Their young admirers and imitators in the class below, adopted these sentiments and manners, and real honesty and virtue were driven to confine themselves among the mercantile citizens, tradesmen and shopkeepers, who could not afford to be thus fashionably vicious.

In France, at that period, and long before, a practice took place among persons of wealth and rank, that gave rise to, and served to excuse, much of the family dissipation and conjugal infidelity, both among the males and females, that was then,

and even to a late period has been, too common in that country; though fast wearing away since the Revolution of 1789, and thence to the accession of the late Bourbon King Charles X. to whom, though not so bad as his predecessors, French morals are under no great obligation. That practice was, the sedulous exclusion of young marriageable females from male society, until their parents had made for them a contract of marriage, wherein the affections, not of the contracting, but the contracted parties had nothing to do. Very often, indeed, young females were taken from the seclusion of the convent, where they were educated, to be married to men of whom they had seen little and knew less by any social intercourse previous to the marriage contract. Under these circumstances, it is no wonder that marriage was considered by the female as a sacrifice of her person to family convenience, and as the means of enjoying liberty, of which till then she had been deprived; and, in the conduct of her acquaintance, she found nothing to check her persuasions, that her husband had no claim upon her but what the law of the land and an unnatural and tyrannical custom had conferred on him. When a woman found herself thus urged into a connexion never desirable, often hateful—sold in fact, to satisfy motives of family pride and aggrandisement— where is the reasonable or natural tie that should bind her to a husband so forced upon her affections, or create fondness founded on esteem, in him, to whom her real character was utterly unknown? Among the bourgeoisie and the lower classes, where wealth did not interfere with freedom of choice, examples of conjugal fidelity and devotedness are and always were as common as in England; the wife was the faithful, frugal, careful helpmate of the husband of her choice. At this day, conjugal fidelity in every class in France, the court excepted, is as common as in England, and the breach of it as disgraceful: nor can the national morality of the two countries in any respect be compared, so as to exhibit the slightest inferiority of the French to the English, or to any other nation upon earth: and now that the last of the infatuated dynasty of legitimate Bourbons has quitted France, we hope and trust forever, the morality of the higher classes of the metropolis will be improved, so far as courts and courtiers can be. Indeed, these classes in England, have nothing to boast of in this respect.

Such being the very natural and obvious excuses for the irregularities of married life among the titled and wealthy portion of the French metropolis, these irregularities may not, perhaps, be forgiven absolutely, but they may be lamented as the results of family tyranny in the customs of society. But what excuse

is there, for similar aberrations from the duties and decencies of married life so common in England? Or can it be pretended that the public conduct of Louis XIV. was half as disgracefal or disgusting as the royal revelries, and utter contempt for public opinion and decorum of George IV.? A man, to whom in this respect, none can be compared but the Regent Duc D'Orleans at the commencement of the 18th century. One striking difference there is between the Misses (Evelyn's denomination) of royalty in France and England, that we cannot accuse the latter of the bold and masculine intermeddling in politics, that caused so much injury and disgrace to the French nation, except, perhaps, in the instance of Lady Castlemaine in Charles II.'s time. Female politicians have been the curse of France, from Madame Maintenon to the present Duchess of Angoulème. In every country in the world, the middle classes, those who are compelled to employ their heads or their hands in some known and respectable employment to earn subsistence, are noted for conjugal attachment and fidelity, and in consequence for conjugal felicity with its accompaniments-content and solid happiness. We are not disposed to deny the public utility of a wealthy class of citizens; far otherwise: but the enormous incomes of Great-Britain and some other countries, far exceed the demands of public expediency: they are liable to too many abuses and misapplications; they furnish far more examples of conduct to be shunned than to be imitated; nor are they productive, generally, of happiness to the proprietors; hence they afford arguments of much weight against the hereditary accumulation of wealth in families, and in favour of the abolition of primogeniture; a very partial, not to say unjust provision of European arrangement, and which seems to have no other intent or meaning, or merit than this accumulation.

The author, in his fourth chapter, after giving a very meagre account of the sports and pastimes of the English at Christmas, Easter, May-day and Whitsuntide-their visitings, their feastings, their morrice dancers, their mummers, their halfdramatic domestic festivities, the ceremonies of Christmas-day, New Year's-day, May-day, Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, forming so many eras in the dull annals of country life-almost all of them omitted, and none of them dwelt on in this very dull and imperfect section-proceeds to a disquisition on the comparative merits of the English dramatists and the French; in which, a due portion of British panegyric is, of course, bestowed on Shakspeare. We acknowledge the variety of Shakspeare's characters, the truth and felicity of their

delineation, and the many poetic beauties interspersed through his plays: circumstances, in which he is undoubtedly superior to the French tragedians, and even to Moliere. But the coarseness of his dialogue, the vulgarity, the obscenity in which he indulges, the savage character of his plots, and the many absurdities throughout his plays that cannot but disgust readers of proper feeling and good taste, require excuses which the regularity of the plot, the beautiful declamation, and the severe morality of the French stage do not need. To enjoy Shakspeare's plays fully, a strong determination to pardon vulgarity and absurdity is absolutely necessary. But what are his plays to those of Beaumont and Fletcher, and the dramatic wits of Charles and King William's days? At length, and in spite of incessant panegyric, public opinion has settled down, even in England, in permanent disfavour of vicious and licentious representations, however enlivened by talent in the plot or the characters, or wit in the dialogue. We are much inclined to doubt the moral influence of theatrical representations any where, especially considering the adventitious but inevitable concomitants of these amusements, but no man, conversant with the French and the English stage, can hesitate for a moment in giving the moral preference, and the superior praise of good taste to the dramatists most in vogue among the French people; such as Corneille, Moliere, Racine and Voltaire. Another circumstance must have greatly contributed to the superior decency and good taste of the stage in France over that of England, that the court and the best educated classes of the French people took the theatre under their protection. In the time of Charles II. the play-houses were mostly in the outskirts of London, and in the immediate vicinity of the worst part of the population of that city; and partook, no doubt, of the manners of those who were most inclined and expected to frequent them. This remark our author also makes, and its correctness, we apprehend, will be conceded.

We agree fully with him in the conclusion to this chapter.

"Could comedy ever be supposed faithfully to hold the mirror up to nature, we might blush at belonging to the nature which her English mirror reflected in the works of the mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease,' immediately after the Restoration. They outrage decency as well as morality, both in the dialogue and in the conduct of their pieces, and describe manners which could never have existed, except in the purlieus of their own theatre. But comedy, we know, can only be implicitly trusted as a recorder of the excesses of a metropolis, and of the fashionable follies and peculiarities of its inhabitants. And, certainly, the highly coloured and coarse sketches which she gave of London at

this period, bear no favourable comparison with similar representations in France.

"Already had the incomparable Moliere enthroned the comic muse on the French theatre. His satire was directed against the follies, not of a metropolis, but of human nature: his portraits exhibited whole classes of individuals, and he seized the ridiculous features of the age, as well as those of his own particular country. His wit, his wisdom, and his gaiety, were the produce of France, but became the property of all Europe. It is a property which has since been so borrowed from and pillaged, that when we now see the frequently stolen. goods in the hands of their original owners, they have lost the charm of surprise and the merit of novelty. But as long as misers and misanthropes, false saints, and affected women, silly husbands, and ignorant physicians exist in the world, so long will Moliere remain their unrivalled painter, historian and satirist."

Carriages, very heavy and very clumsy, like my Lord Mayor's coach of London, holding eight persons or more, were common in Paris towards the close of the reign of Louis XIV.; about the middle of that reign, paying visits on mules began to cease. Still, the state of the roads in the interior forbad the use of carriages; and even mule travelling, in the early part of this reign, was frequently delayed on account of the badness of the roads, as happened, according to La Porte, to Anne of Austria, in 1635, between Pitteaux and Paris. Until 1662, the streets of Paris were so dark and dangerous, that the monopoly of flambeau-bearers, and lanterncarriers was established for the security of night visiting in Paris. A flambeau, for a quarter of an hour, cost about three sous, (not quite three cents) for a foot passenger, and five sous for a carriage. This was afterwards superseded by lamps suspended in the middle of the streets, giving just light enough to make darkness visible. It was not till the establishment of gas lights that even London could be called well lighted. Municipal police is yet very imperfect in Europe, and in its very childhood in America. We are not yet aware, that of all safeguards against nocturnal violence and depredation, none is comparable to LIGHT: a gas-light in the street is fully equal to a watchman in vigilance, and the honesty of a gas-lamp is far more to be depended on. No housebreaker can live or find employment in a welllighted town. Adopting this improvement, add to it a police court, not merely of summary jurisdiction, but of summary justice, for the benefit of travellers, without compelling a man who is in haste to another place on business, to go through the tedious and detestable forms of our Common Law before he can obtain redress for an injury, and something like satisfaction and security will be felt by the public. At present, a man may