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 enlightened any longer to suffer the prejudices that formerly filled them to remain, and have, in their impatience, stored them with new ideas and opinions—­many of them good and useful, but too hastily adopted, and not in harmony with each other to be productive of a good result, until time has enabled their owners to class and arrange them.

I am every day more forcibly struck with the natural quickness and intelligence of the people here:  but this very quickness is a cause that may tend to retard their progress in knowledge, by inducing them to jump at conclusions, instead of marching slowly but steadily to them; and conclusions so rapidly made are apt to be as hastily acted upon, and, consequently, occasion errors that take some time to be discovered, and still more to be corrected, before the truth is attained.