circumstances I did, you would not wonder at my being struck with the coincidence. In this performance the infernal spirit is the hero, and in the disguise of a monk he appears in a convent, where he torments and persecutes the community with a mixture of malignity and mirth truly Satanic. One night that I saw it performed, a groupe of monks were carrying the Host to a dying person; the walls of the theatre were so slight, that we could distinctly hear the sound of the bell which they ring on that occasion. In an instant, actors, audience, and all, were on their knees, and the devil, who happened to be on the stage, knelt among the rest, and crossed himself with visible marks of a devotion equally singular and edifying. You will allow the coincidence to be irresistibly striking. “When he had finished his monstrous profanation of the holy sign, I fixed my eyes on him with an expression not to be mistaken. He saw it. There is not so bitter a reproach on earth as silence, for it always seems to refer the guilty to their own hearts, whose eloquence seldom fails to fill up the pause very little to the satisfaction of the accused. My look threw him into a rage, that I am now convinced not the most bitter upbraidings could have caused. The utmost fury of imprecation would have fallen on his ear like the most lulling harmony;--it would have convinced him that his victim was suffering all he could possibly inflict. He betrayed this in the violence of his exclamations. “What, wretch!” he cried;--“Do you think it was for your masses and your mummeries, your vigils, and fasts, and mumbling over senseless unconsoling beads, and losing my rest all night watching for the matins, and then quitting my frozen mat to nail my knees to stone till they grew there,--till I thought the whole pavement would rise with me when I rose,--do you think it was for the sake of listening to sermons that the preachers did not believe,--and prayers that the lips that uttered them yawned at in the listlessness of their infidelity,--and penances that might be hired out to a lay-brother to undergo for a pound of coffee or of snuff,--and the vilest subserviencies to the caprice and passion of a Superior,--and the listening to men with God for ever in their mouths, and the world for ever in their hearts,--men who think of nothing but the aggrandizement of their temporal distinction, and screen, under the most revolting affectation of a concern in spiritualities, their ravening cupidity after earthly eminence:--Wretch! do you dream that it was for this?--that this _atheism of bigotry_,--this creed of all the priests that ever have existed in connexion with the state, and in hope of extending their interest by that connexion,--could have any influence over _me_? I had sounded every depth in the mine of depravity before them. I knew them,--I despised them. I crouched before them in body, I spurned them in my soul. With all their sanctimony, they had hearts so