In truth, there is nothing on earth which more elevates a man in his own opinion than love, that love whose vast and conquering influence gives light to the heart, and gives it at once happiness and confusion. Can we be surprised if, when Don Juan hoped to appease by love the passions which rent his breast, that the devil spread a net for him? It was he who inspired Don Juan with the thought that by love and the society of woman we may accomplish on earth _those celestial promises which we bear written in the deepest recesses of our hearts, that intense desire which from our earliest days brings us most closely to heaven_. The principal difference Mr. Dwight makes in his rendering of this passage of Hoffman’s is, that where the German, in a very old-fashioned manner, attributes Don Juan’s wickedness to the influence of the Spirit of Evil, Mr. Dwight, by some slight of hand, metamorphoses the Passion of Love into an evil demon, and then gives a _fling_, as he would express it, at the religious discipline of the times to which he applies the very lucid epithet, “_suppressive moralism_.” We wish we had some of that “_suppressive moralism_” at the present day to exercise a little wholesome discipline over the authors of this _Phalanx Socialist Literature_. After this piece of borrowing and altering from Hoffman, the writer talks a great deal about “_the old theme and under-current of Opera—the Body and the Soul—the liberty of Passion in conflict with the Law intensely narrowed down by social custom from God’s great law of universal harmony_,” and such like rubbish, and then informs us in a note, with his usual precision, by way of illustrating this “_under-current_” of “_Body and Soul_” in “_Old Opera theme_,” that, strange to say, the first Opera _he_ reads of, and which was produced at Rome in 1600, bore the name of “_Rappresentatione di Anima e di Corpo!_” Now if this were so, it is puzzling to know what it would have to do with all his talk about “_the under-current of Body and Soul_” in Don Giovanni: but it is not true. The first Opera on record is _Euridice_, the libretto composed by the poet Rinuccini, the music by the composer Peri. It was presented, as he says, in 1600, but not at Rome—at Florence, on the occasion of the marriage of Mary di Medici with Henri Quatre of France. In 1600, Emilio del Cavalieri, of Rome, brought out an _Oratorio_, which was sung in a church in that city, which bore the title “_Dell Anima e di Corpo_;” and the invention of _Recitative_ dates from these two compositions—the opera _Euridice_ of Peri, and the _Sacred Oratorio_ of Cavalieri. But it answered his purpose to imagine this the other way, and with his usual want of accuracy he applied it—or he was ignorant, and with true transcendental presumption, took it for granted no one knew any more than he did.