hibition. This is clearly attested of the Roman people, by the uniform accounts of their own historians: foreign nations ascribed their hardiness in war to this familiarity with blood and death in the amphitheatre; and a Syrian monarch, ambitious, at any rate, to rival the Roman grandeur, hoped to render his effeminate Asiatics equally intrepid and unappalled amidst the horrors of battle, by introducing the same sanguinary entertain-ments in peace. It is a proof that humanity had little interest in the fatal consequences of the Gothic tournaments, and bull-fights of the Spaniards, when that sex, whom compassion and an abhorrence from spectacles of blood may be supposed the last to forsake, was admitted to the most conspicuous seats; as if to gratify them were the chief object of the entertainment. All is mad mirth, and drunken joy, with an American village, while their captive is wasting under their protracted tortures; compassion, or even indifference, would vitiate the festival. Humanity may have repelled from, but ne

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ver

ver invited a single guest to, the cruel entertainments of our own nation. It is to that polished humanity, which a cultivated philosophy and a purer religion have introduced amongst us, that we owe the disréputé into which these vulgar jollities have at length happily fallen.

1. Such representations are, therefore, utterly dissimilar, in their effects upon the heart, to the representations of tragedy and romance. Humanity renounces the one, but welcomes, the other. In those a brutal joy reigns triumphant; in these if there be a joy it is of a singular kind; it wears all the dress of sorrow; and the heart feels that there is a pain more than proportioned to the joy. It is surely, therefore, unphilosophical, to reduce under one class propensities which are of so different a cast and influence; nor can that ingenious French critic, the Abbé du Bos, be justified in deriving them, without distinction, from one common source in the human mind. ↑

But whence then is derived, and how are

we

we to account for, this strange intermixture of pain and a something like joy, excited, in the same instant, by the same object, each apparently dependent on each other, and yet not blended together in one undistinguished mass?Before I attempt the solution of this singular but universal character of man, may not be amiss to take a brief view of some of the most celebrated theories on this subject, and the rather, as the examination of these may lead to the true solution.

it

The French critic just mentioned, the Abbé du Bos, whose reflections on poetry, painting, and music, form a very entertaining work, refers the solution of this difficulty to that aversion which we have to indolence; and in consequence to the delight we feel in having our most active and lively passions roused. 197

This account is striking and bold, as it derives a great deal from one simple and uniform principle. If, indeed, there be such a principle in human nature, exactly as he represents it, original and independent, and

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if it be adequate to the effect which he ascribes to it; and if the mind be sensible of such a reference in the instant of its most interesting emotions; and if the inclination to be thus moved, be proportioned to the force of this supposed principle; we could not wish for a more satisfactory solution, for one which more happily applied itself to the whole subject in question.

Another ingenious Frenchman, Monsieur Fontenelle, so well known to the literary world by his Dialogues, History of Oracles, and Plurality of Worlds, in some reflections on the subject of poetry has hazarded the following fine-spun theory:Pleasure and pain, says he, like many other extremes, approach, and, at a certain point, pass inté each other. Pleasure, pushed too far, be comes pain; and the movement of pain, ä little moderated, becomes pleasure. He is obliged to adopt into his system the funda mental principle of Du Bos; for the heart, he says, loves to be moved, and therefore objects, which are melancholy, and even disastrous

disastrous and sorrowful, are adapted to it; provided that they are softened by some circumstance. This softening eircumstance, according to him, is the comfortable reflec tion, that the whole is but a fiction; with out which, the spectacle would be painful beyond the degree in which it is capable of passing into pleasureb gen1

This is the spirit of Fontenelle's theory ; a theory so exceedingly refined, that we hardly know how to lay hold of it. It does not present us with any thing analogous 10 the real feelings of the heart; and is, indeed, contradictory to the very nature of things, Pleasure and pain, as simple sensations, have no intercourse with each other; though the transitions from the one to the other may be exceedingly quick, and may have their origin from the same external objects. For as ob jects are of a mixed character, the sensations may be mixed also; and in some, the pain ful circumstance, after a certain interval, may disappear, and vice versâ. But where the characters of the painful and the pleasant

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