the strange complication of events than in the shock of opposite passions. The poet has only the power of chance, a power sovereignly capricious, to contend against the passion he has chosen to represent. And thus it is that the modern drama has something also of arbitrary and fantastic. Incidents and theatrical effects are accumulated, but the incidents do not spring from the natural movement of the passions brought upon the stage; they have no longer their cause in the characters of the drama; they issue from the fancy of the poet, who, feeling the necessity of arousing his spectators from time to time, complicates the action after a strange fashion, and aims always at surprise. M. Girardin has a lecture upon suicides, in which he attacks that sentimentality--a mixture, in reality, of weakness and impatience--which in modern literature, and in modern life, often conducts to suicide. The following passage will be acknowledged to be eloquent, and even poetic, unless our translation of it shall have entirely obscured its beauty. After having described the proud and _philosophical_ suicides of ancient Rome, he adds:-- There is another species of suicide more in credit in our days, which is rather occasioned by the weakness and impatience of men than by the violence of their passions, or the eccentricity of their philosophies. This species of suicide is so much the peculiar malady of our times, that we are tempted to think that men are now for the first time infected by it. But no; there exists a literature which has already expressed this our state of restlessness and disquietude, which has described men consuming with melancholy in the midst of riotous joys, and seeking suicide rather as the natural termination of their career than the remedy of their evils. It is the literature of the fathers of the church.