It was _a propos_ of this play, and of my objection to this particular feature of it, that an exceedingly clever French woman laughingly told me she understood there was no such thing as love in America. That a people of manners as artificial as the French, should suppose that others, under the influence of the cold, formal exterior which the puritans have entailed on so large a portion of the public, were without strong feeling, is not altogether as irrational as may at first appear. Art, in ordinary deportment, is both cause and effect. That which we habitually affect to be, gets in the end to be so incorporated with our natural propensities as to form a part of the real man. We all know that by discipline we can get the mastery of our strongest passions, and, on the other hand, by yielding to them and encouraging them, that they soon get the mastery over us. Thus do a highly artificial people, fond of, and always seeking high excitement, come, in time, to feel it artificially, as it were, by natural impulses. I have mentioned the anecdote of the play, because I think it characteristic of a tone of feeling that is quite prevalent among a large class of the French, though I am far from saying there is not a class who would, at once, see the grave sacrifice of principle that is involved, in building up the sentiments of a fiction on such a foundation of animal instinct. I find, on recollection, however, that Miss Lee, in one of her Canterbury Tales, has made the love of her plot hinge on a very similar incident. Surely she must have been under the influence of some of the German monstrosities that were so much in vogue, about the time she wrote, for even Juvenal would scarcely have imagined anything worse, as the subject of his satire. You will get a better idea of the sentimentalism that more or less influences the tables of this country, however, if I tell you that the ladies of the _coterie_, in which the remarks on the amorous sister were made, once gravely discussed in my presence the question whether Madame de Stael was right or wrong, in causing Corinne to go through certain sentimental _experiences_, as our canters call it at home, on a clouded day, instead of choosing one on which the sun was bright: or, _vice versa_; for I really forget whether it was on the "windy side" of sensibility or not, that the daughter of Necker was supposed to have erred.