To the passage we last quoted from Dr Johnson, some other objections suggest themselves; but, as we have not quoted it in a polemical spirit, but merely to illustrate our own position, we have no wish to enter upon them. One remark only we will make, and that because it admits of a general application. Dr Johnson describes the sympathy we feel at the theatre, as the result of a reference to what our own _personal_ feelings would be in the situation we see represented on the stage. The auditor represents to himself "what he would himself feel, if he were to do or suffer what is there feigned to be suffered or to be done. The reflection that strikes the heart is not, that the evils before us are real evils, but that they are evils to which we ourselves may be exposed." We do not think that, in order to sympathize with what takes place on the stage, or in real life, there is any necessity for this circuitous proceeding. We do not detect in ourselves this constant reference to our own personality, and, least of all, in those moments when we are most moved. It is enough that there be a vivid conception of any passion, for this passion to become for a moment our own. If this reference to our probable feelings, in such or such a position, were necessary, how is it that we men sympathize so promptly and so keenly in the distresses of the heroine? We certainly do not, for instance, set to work to imagine ourselves women and mothers--which would be a difficult exercise of the imagination--before we feel the grief of Constance for the loss of her child. In short, we at once assume to ourselves the passions of another; we do not wait, as it were, to try them on; to make experiment how we, with all our dispositions, natural and acquired, should feel in the supposed predicament. It is far from our intention to give a full and methodical account of the lectures of M. Saint-Marc Girardin, the perusal of which led us to a reconsideration of some of our critical principles. They are far above mediocrity, distinguished by strong sense and vivid expression. Their principal feature is the just and animated protest they contain against the literary taste of the present day in France; a taste for the perverted, the horrible, the monstrous; a taste that welcomes Victor Hugo with outstretched arms, and retains but a frigid recollection of Racine. With this literary taste is intimately connected an unhealthy and feverish condition of the moral sentiments, against which the lecturer directs his most eloquent attacks; so that his book may be commended for its sound ethical as well as critical instruction. The circumstance that the lectures were delivered before the University of Paris, renders this strain of remark still more appropriate and useful.