innocent being to whom she must soon give life demands from her a father. She presented herself to Giulio, Stay,' cried she, Giulio, I must speak to you, and you must listen to me! I will not quit you till you have given me the key of the convent garden-I must have it. Oh, Giulio, much more than my life is dependant on you!'-At these words Giulio roused himself as if from a dreadful dream. 'Wretched woman,' cried he, what sayest thou? Begone! Fly far from this spot!' But Theresa threw herself at his feet, vowing never to quit him till he had granted her demand. Giulio's efforts to escape from her were in vain; a supernatural force seemed to animate Theresa. 'Swear,' said she, that this night, at midnight, we shall meet again.' While she thus persisted, a slight sound was heard. Giulio yielded the key to her. At midnight,' said he, and they separated. "At midnight Theresa repaired to the garden; the night was dark, she dared not call, for fear of discovery; soon, however, she heard the approach of footsteps, it was Giulio. What wilt thou?' said he,

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Speak, the moments are brief! Cease, I charge thee, to pursue a wretch who can never render thee happy. Theresa, I love thee! Without thee, life is an insupportable burthen; and near thee, my remorse is beyond endurance, it embitters my happiest moments! Thou hast witnessed my despair! How often have I accused thee! Pardon, pardon, my beloved! It is right that I should punish myself—I have renounced thee, that sacrifice expiates my crime!' He ceased, suffocated by his grief. Theresa endeavoured to console him, to direct his views towards a happy future: Giulio,' said she, for myself only I should not have dared to seek thee. Like thee, I would not have shrunk from death, but this pledge of our love demands that we should live: come then, Giulio, let us depart! All is ready for our flight!' Giulio, in his terrible agitation, suffered himself to be led along by her ;—a few minutes more, and they would have been united for ever. But, suddenly disengaging himself from the arms of Theresa, No,' said he, never!'-and he plunged his poniard into her bosom; she fell, and Giulio was covered with her blood. He stood gazing on her with a bewildered air. Day was beginning to dawn, the convent bell tolled; he raised the inanimate body of her who had so much loved him, and threw it into the sea. Then, with a wild and hurried step, he entered the church;-his blood-stained robe, the poinard he still held in his hand,—all told of guilt and death! He was quickly seized, he made no resistance--Giulio disappeared for ever!"

*

When Bonaparte pronounced these words, he approached the Empress in the attitude of one who draws a dagger: so strong was the illusion, that the ladies in waiting threw themselves between him and his wife, crying out loudly. Bonaparte, as a consummate actor, pursued his narrative undisturbed, without appearing to notice the effect he had produced. The Empress pressed for some details respecting the fate of Giulio; the Emperor replied laconically, The crimes and secrets of cloisters are impenetrable.'-The story of Giulio is not a fiction; before the Revolution, an adventure similar to the one above related, happened in a couvent at Lyons; the documents relating to it fell into the hands of Bonaparte, and furnished him, almost entirely, with the subject of Giulio.

NOVELTY AND FAMILIARITY.

"Horatio. Custom hath made it a property of easiness in him.

Hamlet. The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense." SHAKSPEARE represents his gravedigger as singing while he is occupied in his usual task of flinging the skulls out of the earth with his spade. On this he takes occasion to remark, through one of his speakers, the effect of habit in blunting our sensibility to what is painful or disgusting in itself. "Custom hath made it a property of easiness in him." To which the other is made to reply in substance, that those who have the least to do have the finest feelings generally. The minds and bodies of those who are enervated by luxury and ease, and who have not had to encounter the wear and tear of life, present a soft, unresisting surface to outward impressions, and are endued with a greater degree of susceptibility to pleasure and pain. Habit in most cases hardens and encrusts, by taking away the keener edge of our sensations; but does it not in others soften and refine, by giving a mechanical facility, and by engrafting an acquired sense? Habit may be said, in technical language, to add to our irritability and lessen our sensibility, or to sharpen our active perceptions, and deaden our passive ones. Practice makes perfect,-experience makes us wise. The one refers to what we have to do, not to what we feel. I will endeavour to explain the distinction, and to give some examples in each kind.

Clowns, servants, and common labourers have, it is true, hard and coarse hands, because they are accustomed to hard and coarse employments; but mechanics, artizans, and artists of various descriptions, who are as constantly employed, though on works demanding greater skill and exactness, acquire a proportionable nicety and discrimination of tact with practice and unremitted application. A working jeweller can perceive slight distinctions of surface, and make the smallest incisions in the hardest substances from mere practice: a woollen-draper perceives the different degrees of the fineness in cloth, on the same principle; a watchmaker will insert a great bony fist, and perform the nicest operations among the springs and wheels of a complicated and curious machinery, where the soft delicate hand of a woman or a child would make nothing but blunders. Again, a blind man shews a prodigious sagacity in hearing and almost feeling objects at a distance from him. His other senses acquire an almost preternatural quickness from the necessity of recurring to them oftener, and relying on them more implicitly, in consequence of the privation of sight. The musician distinguishes tones and notes, the painter expressions and colours, from constant habit and unwearied attention, that are quite lost upon the common observer. The critic discovers beauties in a poem, the poet features in nature, that are generally overlooked by those who have not employed their imaginations or understandings on these particular studies. Whatever art or science we devote ourselves to, we grow more perfect in with time and practice. The range of our perceptions is at once enlarged and refined. But there lies the question that must "give us pause"-is the pleasure increased in proportion to our habitual and critical discernment, or does not our familiarity with nature, with science, and with art, breed an indifference for those objects we are most conversant with and most masters of? I am afraid the answer, if an VOL. XIII. NO. L.

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honest one, must be on the unfavourable side; and that from the moment that we can be said to understand any subject thoroughly, or can execute any art skilfully, our pleasure in it will be found to be on the decline. No doubt, that with the opening of every new inlet of ideas, there is unfolded a new source of pleasure; but this does not last much longer than the first discovery we make of this terra incognita; and with the closing up of every avenue of novelty, of curiosity, and of mystery, there is an end also of our transport, our wonder, and our delight; or it is converted into a very sober, rational, and household sort of satisfaction.

There is a craving after information, as there is after food; and it is in supplying the void, in satisfying the appetite, that the pleasure in both cases chiefly consists. When the uneasy want is removed, both the pleasure and the pain cease. So in the acquisition of knowledge or of skill, it is the transition from perplexity and helplessness that relieves and delights us; it is the surprise occasioned by the unfolding of some new aspect of nature that fills our eyes with tears and our hearts with joy; it is the fear of not succeeding that makes success so welcome, and a giddy uncertainty about the extent of our acquisitions that makes us drunk with unexpected possession. We are happy not in the total amount of our knowledge, but in the last addition we have made to it, in the removal of some obstacle, in the drawing aside of some veil, in the contrast between the, obscurity of night and the brightness of the dawn. But objects are magnified in the mist and haze of confusion; the mind is most open to receive striking impressions of things in the outset of its progress. The most trivial pursuits or successes then agitate the whole brain; whereas afterwards the most important only occupy one corner of it. The facility which habit gives in admitting new ideas, or in reflecting upon old ones, renders the exercise of intellectual activity a matter of comparative insignificance; and by taking away the resistance and the difficulty, takes away the liveliness of impulse that imparts a sense of pleasure or of pain to the soul. No one reads the same book twice over with the same satisfaction. It is not that our knowledge of it is not greater the second time than the first: but our interest in it is less, because the addition we make to our knowledge the second time is very trifling, while in the first perusal it was all clear gain. Thus in youth and childhood every step is fairy-ground, because every step is an advance in knowledge and pleasure, opens new prospects, and excites new hopes, as in afteryears, though we may enlarge our circle a little, and measure our way more accurately, yet in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred we only retrace our steps, and repeat the same dull round of weariness and disappointment. Knowledge is power; but it is not pleasure, except when it springs immediately out of ignorance and incapacity. An actor, who plays a character for the hundred and fortieth time, understands and perhaps performs it better; but does he feel the part? has he the same pleasure in it as he had the first time? The wonder is how he can go through it at all; nor could he, were he not supported by the plaudits of the audience (who seem like new friends to him), or urged on by the fear of disgrace, to which no man is ever reconciled.

I will here take occasion to suggest what appears to me the true state of the question, whether a great actor is enabled to embody his part

from feeling or from study. I think at the time from neither; but merely (or chiefly at least) from habit. But I think he must have felt the character in the first instance with all the enthusiasm of nature and genius, or he never would have distinguished himself in it. To say that the intellect alone can determine or supply the movements or the language of passion, is little short of a contradiction in terms. Substituting the head for the heart is like saying that the eye is a judge of sounds or the ear of colours. If a man in cold blood knows how another feels in a fit of passion, it is from having been in a passion himself before. Nor can the indifferent observation of the outward signs attain to the truth of nature without the inward sympathy to impel us forward, and to tell us where to stop. Without that living criterion, we shall be either tame and mechanical, or turgid and extravagant. The study of individual models produces imitators and mannerists: the study of general principles produces pedants. It is feeling alone that makes up for the deficiencies of either mode of study; that expands the meagreness of the one, that unbends the rigidity of the other, that floats a man into the tide of popularity, and electrifies an audience. It is feeling, or it is, hope and fear, joy and sorrow, love and hatred, that is the original source of the effects in nature which are brought forward on the stage; and assuredly it is a sympathy with this feeling that must dictate the truest and most natural imitations of them. To suppose that a person altogether dead to these primary passions of the human breast can make a great actor, or feign the effects while he is entirely ignorant of the cause, is no less absurd than to suppose that I can describe a place which I never saw, or mimic a voice which I never heard, or speak a language which I never learnt. An actor void of genius and passion may be taught to strut about the stage, and mouth out his words with mock-solemnity, and give himself the airs of a great actor, but he will never be one. He may express his own emptiness and vanity, and make people stare, but he will not "send the hearers weeping to their beds." The true, original master-touches that go to the heart, must come from it. There is neither truth nor beauty without nature. Habit may repeat the lesson that is thus learnt, just as a poet may transcribe a fine passage without being affected by it at the time, but he could not have written it in the first instance without feeling the beauty of the object he was describing, or without having been deeply impressed with it in some moment of enthusiasm. It was then that his genius was inspired, his style formed, and the foundation of his fame laid. People tell you that Sterne was hard-hearted; that the author of Waverley is a mere worldling; that Shakspeare was a man without passions. Do not believe them. Their passions might have worn themselves out with constant over-excitement, so that they only knew how they formerly felt; or they might have the control over them; or from their very compass and variety they might have kept one ano. ther in check, so that none got very much a-head, and broke out into extravagant and overt acts. But those persons must have experienced the feelings they express, and entered into the situations they describe so finely, at some period or other of their lives: the sacred source from whence the tears trickle down the cheeks of others, was once full, though it may be now dried up; and in all cases where a strong impression of truth and nature is conveyed to the minds of others, it must

have previously existed in an equal or greater degree in the mind producing it. Perhaps it does not strictly follow, that

They best can paint them, who have felt them most.” To do this in perfection other qualifications may be necessary: language may be wanting where the heart speaks, but that the tongue or the pen or pencil can describe the workings of nature with the highest truth and eloquence without being prompted or holding any communication with the heart, past, present, or to come, I utterly deny. When Talma, in the part of Edipus, after the discovery of his misfortune, slowly raises his hands and joins them together over his head in an attitude of despair, I conceive it is because in the extremity of his anguish, and in the full sense of his ghastly and desolate situation, he feels a want of something as a shield or covering to protect him from the weight that is ready to fall on and crush him, and he makes use of that fine and impressive action for this purpose:-not that I suppose he is affected in this manner every time he repeats it, but he never would have thought of it but from having this deep and bewildering feeling of weight and oppression, which naturally suggested it to his imagination, and at the same time assured him that it was just. Feeling is, in fact, the scale that weighs the truth of all original conceptions. When Mrs. Siddons played the part of Mrs. Beverley in the Gamester, and on Stukely's abrupt declaration of his unprincipled passion at the moment of her husband's imprisonment, threw into her face that noble succession of varying emotions, first seeming not to understand him, then, as her doubt is removed, rising into sudden indignation, then turning to pity, and ending in a burst of hysteric scorn and laughter, was this the effect of stratagem or forethought as a painter arranges a number of colours on his palette? No--but by placing herself amply in the situation of her heroine, and entering into all the circumstances, and feeling the dignity of insulted virtue and misfortune, that wonderful display of keen and high-wrought expressions burst from her involuntarily at the same moment, and kindled her face almost into a blaze of lightning. Yet Mrs. Siddons is sometimes accused of being cold and insensible. I do not wonder that she may seem so after exertions such as these; as the Sibyls of old after their inspired prophetic fury sunk upon the ground, breathless and exhausted. But that any one can embody high thoughts and passions without having the prototypes in their own breast, is what I shall not believe upon hearsay, and what I am sure cannot be proved by argument.

It is a common complaint, that actors and actresses are dull when off the stage. I do not know that it is the case; but I own I should be surprised if it were otherwise. Many persons expect from the éclat with which they appear in certain characters to find them equally bril liant in company, not considering that the effect they produce in their artificial characters is the very circumstance that must disqualify them for producing any in ordinary cases. They who have intoxicated and maddened multitudes by their public display of talent, can rarely be supposed to feel much stimulus in entertaining one or two friends, or in being the life of a dinner-party. She who perished over-night by the dagger or the bowl as Cassandra or Cleopatra, may be allowed to sip her tea in silence, and not to be herself again till she revives in