as we all do, without taking the same credit for it to ourselves that the old blockhead in France does, that being human, we have sympathies with all, even the lowest and wickedest of our kind.  But the interest those works excite arises from no such legitimate source—­not from the development of our common nature, but from the creation of a new one—­from startling contrasts, not of two characters but of one—­tenderness, generosity in one page; fierceness and murder in the next.  But though our English tastes are so far deteriorated as to tolerate, or even to admire, the records of cruelty and sin now proceeding every day from the press—­our English morals would recoil with horror from the deliberate wickedness which forms the great attraction of the French modern school of romance.  The very subjects chosen for their novels, by the most popular of their female writers, shows a state of feeling in the authors more dreadful to contemplate than the mere coarse raw-head-and-bloody-bones descriptions of our chroniclers of Newgate.  A married woman, the heroine—­high in rank, splendid in intellect, radiant in beauty—­has for the hero a villain escaped from the hulks.  There is no record of his crimes—­we are not called upon to follow him in his depredations, or see him cut throats in the scientific fashion of some of our indigenous rascals.  He is the philosopher,—­the instructor—­the guide.  The object of his introduction is to show the iniquity of human laws—­the object of her introduction is to show the absurdity of the institution of marriage.  This would never be tolerated in England.  Again, a married woman is presented to us—­for the sympathy which with us attends a young couple to the church-door, only begins in France after they have left it:  as a child she has been betrothed to a person of her own rank—­at five or six incurable idiocy takes possession of her proposed husband—­but when she is eighteen the marriage takes place—­the husband is a mere child still; for his intellect has continued stationary though his body has reached maturity—­a more revolting picture was never presented than that of the condition of the idiot’s wife—­her horror of her husband—­and of course her passion for another.  The most interesting scenes between the lovers are constantly interrupted by the hideous representative of matrimony, the grinning husband, who rears his slavering countenance from behind the sofa, and impresses his unfortunate wife with a sacred awe for the holy obligations of marriage.

Again, a dandy of fifty is presented to us, whose affection for his ward has waited, of course, till she is wedded to another, to ripen into love.  He still continues her protector against the advances of others; for jealousy is a good point of character in every one but the husband, and there it is only ridiculous.  The husband in this case is another admirable specimen of the results of wedlock for life—­he is a chattering, shallow pretender—­a political