In France, the Great Revolution, while it multiplied the theatres with the natural extravagance of the time, yet, by a consequence equally inevitable, degraded the taste of the nation. For a long period the legitimate drama was almost extinguished: it was unexciting to a people trained day by day to revolutionary convulsion; the pageants on the stage were tame to the processions in the streets; and the struggles of kings and nobles were ridiculous to the men who had been employed in destroying a dynasty. Napoleon at once perceived the evil, and adopted the only remedy. He found no less than _thirty_ theatres in Paris. He was not a man to pause where he saw his way clearly before him; he closed twenty-two of those theatres, leaving but eight, and those chiefly of the old establishments, making a species of compensation to the closed houses. On the return of the Bourbons the civil list, as in the old times, assisted in the support of the theatres. On the accession of Louis Philippe, the popular triumph infused its extravagance even into the system of the drama. The number of the theatres increased, and a succession of writers of the "New School" filled the theatres with abomination. Gallantry became the _spirit_ of the drama--everything before the scene was intrigue; married life was the perpetual burlesque. Wives were the habitual heroines of the intrigue, and husbands the habitual dupes! To keep faith with a husband was a standing jest on the stage, to keep it with a seducer was the height of human character. The former was always described as brutal, gross, dull, and born to be duped; the latter was captivating, generous, and irresistible by any matron alive. In fact, wives and widows were made for nothing else but to give way to the fascinations of this class of professors of the arts of "good society." The captivator was substantially described as a scoundrel, a gambler, and a vagabond of the basest kind, but withal so honourable, so tender, and so susceptible, that his atrocities disappeared, or rather were transmuted into virtues, by the brilliancy of his qualifications for seducing the wife of his friend. Perjury, profligacy, and the betrayal of confidence in the most essential tie of human nature, were supreme in popularity in the Novel and on the Stage. The direct consequence is, that the crime of adultery is lightly considered in France; even the pure speak of it without the abhorrence which, for every reason, it deserves. Its notoriety is rather thought of as an anecdote of the day, or the gossiping of the soirée; and the most acknowledged licentiousness does not exclude a man of a certain rank from general reception in good society.