at receiving no better-perhaps worse-treatment than the maculate ones; but who are we that we should throw the first stone? Are not our own wild oats sown in glass houses?

It must be owned, lastly, that we do not find in every department of modern life grounds for congratulation similar to those mentioned above. While the all-concealing mantle of Charity is gracefully draped over private vices, supposed derelictions of duty in public affairs are remorselessly exhibited, and attributed to the basest of motives. This, of course, proceeds from patriotism, or it would be very unpleasant to contemplate. For one honourable gentleman who happens to differ from another as to the conduct of national affairs, to represent that other as a serpent who has crawled into an Eden expressly to tempt an Eve to the ruin of all, is a very disagreeable thing to have to do, and only the sternest necessity, coupled with a Spartan fortitude, can account for its being done. Remembering this, we should ex*tend our sympathy to the first honourable gentleman, in the same way that we do the grammarian who was obliged to consign his opponent to eternal perdition for his treatise on the irregular Verbs. Charity is, of course, all very well in its proper place, but when a man does not partake your views in politics it would be the merest affectation and hypocrisy to pretend that he is not the vilest of created things, and that the crimes of himself and sinners like him are directly answerable for our severe winters, the prevalence of bronchitis, and the potato disease. Let no such man be trusted!

THE DELIGHTS OF BEING

HORRIFIED.

F all the mysteries which enter into the composition of human nature-that concrete of mysteries-the most astonishing is, perhaps, the pleasure we derive from the observation of the horrible. We are shocked into interest, horrified into delight. This unaccountable emotion lies at the root of the enjoyment we find in the perusal of romances and the contemplation of tragedies. It is also intimately associated with the satisfaction we derive from more ignoble entertainments. "Oh, horrible! most horrible!" exclaims Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, as he listens to the woful story told by his Father's Ghost; yet is he riveted to the spot by the ghastly narrative. He is under the spell of a fascination too strong to be resisted. So also are the audience, whose hearts beat with unwonted quickness, whose every fibre thrills, and who can hardly contain themselves for speechless transport, as they watch the gliding of the mailed apparition over the ramparts of Elsinore, and give ear to his sepulchral utterances. The same thing happens in Macbeth. When the owl shrieks from the battlements, and the lightnings flash, and the castle rocks to its foundation beneath the rever

beration of the thunder-peals, and the Thane of Cawdor seeks to clutch the air-drawn dagger which symbolises the bloody business on which he is intent, the spectators "sup full with horrors," even as he does, and find a pleasure too keen for words in looking at his terror-stricken face, and witnessing his compunctuous visitings.

"No colour affecteth the eye with much displeasure," says Lord Bacon; "but there be sights that are horrible, because they excite the memory of things that are odious or fearful." Very true; yet do these sights enthral the fancy, and hold the imagination in delightful captivity. Of this, the modern drama, though fallen from the august dignity of the tragic muse, still furnishes some remarkable instances. Take, for one example, the Bob Acres of Mr. John S. Clarke in The Rivals. In this wonderful piece of acting the artist makes a powerful appeal to the sense of the horrible in the spectators. The terror of the coward and his anguish at the thought of having to fight a duel are so powerfully depicted by the actor as to constitute the charm of the performance. Mr. Clarke's Acres is a poltroon to the heart's core. He is sick for fear. "His fear is contagious," as that excellent critic, my friend Mr. Joseph Knight, acutely remarks. He is the very incarnation of fear. You partake his terror, and get frightened as you look at him. With such subtlety is horror portrayed by the actor that you are appalled into interest, terrified into pleasure.

Parallel cases occur in fictional literature. No stories live in the memory with such tenacious vitality as those which horrify, even while they delight us. The legends of Jason, Medea, Medusa, Orestes, the Eumenides, once read, can never be forgotten. As much may be said of such works

of modern fiction as are addressed to our sense of the terrible. That is the reason why ghost-stories are so popular, and why people who should know better tolerate the tricks of Spiritualists and kindred impostors, versed in the art of telling lies that make the blood of nervous hearers freeze in their veins, and their hair stand on end. While veracious histories are often consigned to undeserved oblivion, Mrs. Ratcliffe's blood-curdling romances still flourish in amaranthine luxuriance. Nor hers alone, but others also equally alarming. Who has not shuddered over The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Castle of Otranto, Godwin's St. Leon, Lewis's Monk, and the Frankenstein of Mrs. Shelley? Mr. Gladstone's work on Bulgarian Atrocities, and Mr. Belward's clever travestie of it, called Vulgarian Atrocities, are equally provocative of horror, and therefore of pleasure. Of all the enchanting women so charmingly described by Sir Walter Scott, none are so vividly remembered as the tremendous Meg Merrilees and the awful Norna of Fitful Head. No creations of Dickens's teeming fancy stand out in more salient relief than Squeers, Quilp, Sally Brass, and Sikes. Than any one of these odious personages, it may be truly said that

Lewis never bought or borrowed
Any horror half so horrid.

But they live imperishably, in right of the horror they inspire. No other heroine of Colman's survives in such vigour as the unfortunate Miss Bailey. Many righteous kings are forgotten, but Nero, Caligula, Vitellius, and Domitian are damned to everlasting fame. So is Bluebeard. I protest, it was no later than yesterday, while I was standing, as wet as a fish, at the Mansion House, waiting for

an omnibus, that a ragged fellow came up to me, and asked me to purchase a most interesting story for a penny. "It will make you shiver all over, sir, like a dog in a wet sack," said he. Though already in that condition, I bought the book, and what do you suppose it was?-Bluebeard; or, The Fatal Effects of Female Curiosity! Though I had not perused it since I was a boy, I plunged into it there and then, and forgetting all about my omnibus, never stirred from the spot-no, not though the rain was coming down in torrents— until I had read it from cover to cover. I then made a present of it to a policeman, who assured me that he would read it to his wife that very night, before he went to bed.

Men of high intellectual powers have revelled in the horrible as in a sea of delight. That Goliah of literature and master of ill-manners, Dr. Johnson, believed, as everybody knows, in ghosts and apparitions. Soame Jenyns, an elegant scholar and a leader of society, found a strange delight in witnessing executions. Mortimer, the painter, a man of such exquisite sensibility that he could not find it in his heart to kill a blackbeetle, took his subjects of illustration from Foxe's Book of Martyrs, and gloried in representing men, women, and children undergoing the most frightful torture. No more humane man ever lived than Henderson, the celebrated actor, yet his biographer assures us that his favourite books were the Story of the Cruel and Most Bloody Murder of Maister Robert Heath, in his own House in High Holborne, being the Sign of the Fire Brande; the Life and Death of Lewis Gaudfredy, with his Abominable Sorceries, after Selling himself to the Devil; and the Lamentable and True Tragedie of Maister Arden, of Feversham, who was Most Wicked