place in the literary banquet; and that if they are not worth as much as the substantial joints, the natural and generous wines of the first course, at least they furnish the dessert. The dessert over, we must leave the table. After Sheridan, we leave it forthwith. Henceforth comedy languishes, fails; there is nothing left but farce, such as Townley's "High Life Below Stairs," the burlesques of George Colman, a tutor, an old maid, countrymen and their dialect; caricature succeeds painting; Punch raises a laugh when the days of Reynolds and Gainsborough are over. There is nowhere in Europe, at the present time, a more barren stage; the higher classes abandon it to the people. This is because the form of society and of intellect which had called it into being, has disappeared. Vivacity, and the abundance of original conceptions, had peopled the stage of the Renaissance in England--a surfeit which, unable to display itself in systematic argument, or to express itself in philosophical ideas, found its natural outlet only in mimic action and talking characters. The wants of polished society had nourished the English comedy of the seventeenth century--a society which, accustomed to the representations of the court and the displays of the world, sought on the stage a copy of its conversation and its drawing-rooms. With the decline of the court and the check of mimic invention, the genuine drama and the genuine comedy disappeared; they passed from the stage into books. The reason of it is, that people no longer live in public, like the embroidered dukes of Louis XIV and Charles II, but in their families, or at the writing-table; the novel replaces the theatre at the same time that citizen life replaces the life of the court. [Footnote 219: See especially the portraits of Lady Morland, Lady Williams, the Countess of Ossory, the Duchess of Cleveland, Lady Price, and many others.] [Footnote 220: Oliver Cromwell's "Letters and Speeches," edited by Carlyle, 1866, I. 39.--Tr.] [Footnote 221: Colonel Hutchinson was at one time held in suspicion because he wore long hair and dressed well.] [Footnote 222: 1648; thirty in one day. One of them confessed that she had been at a gathering of more than five hundred witches.] [Footnote 223: In 1652, the kirk-session of Glasgow "brot boyes and servants before them, for breaking the sabbath, and other faults. They had clandestine censors, and gave money to some for this end."--Note 28, taken from Wodrow's "Analecta"; Buckle, "History of Civilization in England," 3 vols. 1867, III. 208. Even early in the eighteenth century, "the most popular divines" in Scotland affirmed that Satan "frequently appears clothed in a corporeal substance."--Ibid. III. 233, note 76, taken from Memoirs of C. L. Lewes.