Yes! I repeat, in history, where certain isolated facts and actions are recorded, without any relation to causes, or motives, or connecting feelings and pictures exhibited, from which the considerate mind turns in disgust, and the feeling heart has no relief but in positive, and I may add, reasonable incredulity. I have lately seen one of Correggio's finest pictures, in which the three Furies are represented, not as ghastly deformed hags, with talons and torches, and snaky hair, but as young women, with fine luxuriant forms and regular features, and a single serpent wreathing the tresses like a bandeau--but _such_ countenances!--such a hideous expression of malice, cunning, and cruelty!--and the effect is beyond conception appalling. Leonardo da Vinci worked upon the same grand principle of art in his Medusa-- Where it is less the horror than the grace Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone-- * * * * 'Tis the melodious tints of beauty thrown Athwart the hue of guilt and glare of pain, That humanize and harmonize the strain. And Shakspeare, who understood all truth, worked out his conceptions on the same principle, having said himself, that "proper deformity shows not in the fiend so horrid as in women." Hence it is that whether he portrayed the wickedness founded in perverted power, as in Lady Macbeth; or the wickedness founded in weakness, as in Gertrude, Lady Anne, or Cressida, he is the more fearfully impressive, because we cannot claim for ourselves an exemption from the same nature, before which, in its corrupted state, we tremble with horror or shrink with disgust. MEDON. Do you remember that some of the commentators of Shakspeare have thought it incumbent on their gallantry to express their utter contempt for the scene between Richard and Lady Anne, as a monstrous and incredible libel on your sex? ALDA.