These efforts have been sufficiently successful--not from the merit of
the pieces, but from the novelty of the subject. The people in general
were strangers to the interior of convents: they beheld them with that
kind of respect which is usually produced in uninformed minds by mystery
and prohibition. Even the monastic habit was sacred from dramatic uses;
so that a representation of cloisters, monks, and nuns, their costumes
and manners, never fails to attract the multitude.--But the same cause
which renders them curious, makes them credulous. Those who have seen no
farther than the Grille, and those who have been educated in convents,
are equally unqualified to judge of the lives of the religious; and their
minds, having no internal conviction or knowledge of the truth, easily
become the converts of slander and falsehood.

I cannot help thinking, that there is something mean and cruel in this
procedure. If policy demand the sacrifice, it does not require that the
victims should be rendered odious; and if it be necessary to dispossess
them of their habitations, they ought not, at the moment they are thrown
upon the world, to be painted as monsters unworthy of its pity or
protection. It is the cowardice of the assassin, who murders before he
dares to rob.

This custom of making public amusements subservient to party, has, I
doubt not, much contributed to the destruction of all against whom it has
been employed; and theatrical calumny seems to be always the harbinger of
approaching ruin to its object; yet this is not the greatest evil which
may arise from these insidious politics--they are equally unfavourable
both to the morals and taste of the people; the first are injured beyond
calculation, and the latter corrupted beyond amendment. The orders of
society, which formerly inspired respect or veneration, are now debased