Coarse sensuality admits, again, an occasional competition of the gratifications of cruelty; a flagrant characteristic, generally, of uncultivated degraded human creatures, both where the whole community consists of such, as in barbarian and savage tribes, and where they form a large portion of it, as in this country.--It is hardly worth while to put in words the acknowledgment of the obvious and odious fact, that a considerable share of mental attainment is sometimes inefficient to extinguish, or even repress, this infernal principle of human nature, by which it is gratifying to witness and inflict suffering, even separately from any prompting of revenge. But why do we regard such examples as peculiarly hateful, and brand them with the most intense reprobation, but _because_ it is judged the fair and natural tendency of mental cultivation to repress that principle, insomuch that its failure to do so is considered as evincing a surpassing virulence of depravity? Every one is ready with the saying of the ancient poet, that liberal acquirements suppress ferocious propensities. But if the whole virtue of such discipline may prove insufficient, think what must be the consequence of its being almost wholly withheld, so that the execrable propensity may go into action with its malignity unmitigated, unchecked, by any remonstrance of feeling or taste, or reason or conscience. And such a consequence is manifest in the lower ranks of our self-extolled community; notwithstanding a diminution, which the progress of education and religion has slowly effected, in certain of the once most favorite and customary practices of cruelty; what we might denominate the classic games of the rude populace. These very practices, nevertheless, still keep their ground in some of the more heathenish parts of the country; and if it were possible, that the more improved notions and taste of the more respectable classes could admit of any countenance being given to their revival in the more civilized parts, it would be found that, even there, a large portion of the people is to this hour left in a disposition which would welcome the return of savage exhibitions. It may be, that some of the most atrocious forms and degrees of cruelty would not please the greater number of them; there have been instances in which an English populace has shown indignation at extreme and _unaccustomed_ perpetrations, sometimes to the extent of cruelly revenging them; very rarely, however, when only brute creatures have been the sufferers. Not many would be delighted with such scenes as those which, in the _Place de Grève_, used to be a gratification to a multitude of all ranks of the Parisians. But how many odious facts, characteristic of our people, have come under every one's observation.