duty; which revels in the horrible as freely as any French novelist
of the romantic school; and whose only value is its pitiless exposure
of the profligacy of the Romish priesthood: if an exposure can be
valuable which makes a mock equally of things truly and falsely
sacred, and leaves on the reader's mind the fear that the writer saw
nothing in heaven or earth worthy of belief, respect, or self-
sacrifice, save personal enjoyment.

Now this is the morality of the Italian novelists; and to judge from
their vivid sketches (which, they do not scruple to assert, were
drawn from life, and for which they give names, places, and all
details which might amuse the noble gentlemen and ladies to whom
these stories are dedicated), this had been the morality of Italy for
some centuries past. This, also, is the general morality of the
English stage in the seventeenth century. Can we wonder that
thinking men should have seen a connection between Italy and the
stage? Certainly the playwrights put themselves between the horns of
an ugly dilemma. Either the vices which they depicted were those of
general English society, and of themselves also (for they lived in
the very heart of town and court foppery); or else they were the
vices of a foreign country, with which the English were comparatively
unacquainted. In the first case, we can only say that the Stuart age
in England was one which deserved purgation of the most terrible
kind, and to get rid of which the severest and most abnormal measures
would have been not only justifiable, but, to judge by the experience
of all history, necessary; for extraordinary diseases never have
been, and never will be, eradicated save by extraordinary medicines.
In the second case, the playwrights were wantonly defiling the minds
of the people, and, instead of 'holding up a mirror to vice,'
instructing frail virtue in vices which she had not learned, and