But this very acuteness of apprehension induces a caution in not resenting the assaults of wit, unless the wounded can retort with success by a similar weapon, or that the attack has been so obvious that he is justified in resenting it by a less poetical one. Hence arises a difficult position for him on whom a wit is pleased to exercise his talent; and this is one of the many reasons why privileged persons seldom add much to the harmony of society. Went last night to the Porte St. Martin, and saw _Sept Heures_ represented. This piece has excited a considerable sensation at Paris; and the part of the heroine, "Charlotte Corday," being enacted by Madame Dorval, a very clever actress, it is very popular. "Charlotte Corday" is represented in the piece, not as a heroine actuated purely by patriotic motives in seeking the destruction of a tyrant who inflicted such wounds on her country, but by the less sublime one of avenging the death of her lover. This, in my opinion, lessens the interest of the drama, and atones not for the horror always inspired by a woman's arming herself for a scene of blood. The taste of the Parisians has, I think, greatly degenerated, both in their light literature and their dramas. The desire for excitement, and not a decrease of talent, is the cause; and this morbid craving for it will, I fear, lead to injurious consequences, not only in literature, but in other and graver things. The schoolmaster is, indeed, abroad in France, and has in all parts of it found apt scholars--perhaps, too apt; and, like all such, the digestion of what is acquired does not equal the appetite for acquisition: consequently, the knowledge gained is as yet somewhat crude and unavailable. Nevertheless, the people are making rapid strides in improvement; and ignorance will soon be more rare than knowledge formerly was. At present, their minds are somewhat unsettled by the recentness of their progress; and in the exuberance consequent on such a state, some danger is to be apprehended. Like a room from which light has been long excluded, and in which a large window is opened, all the disagreeable objects in it so long shrouded in darkness are so fully revealed, that the owner, becoming impatient to remove them and substitute others in their place, often does so at the expense of appropriateness, and crowds the chamber with a heterogeneous _mélange_ of furniture, which, however useful in separate parts, are too incongruous to produce a good effect. So the minds of the French people are now too enlightened any longer to suffer the prejudices that formerly filled them to remain, and have, in their impatience, stored them with new ideas and opinions--many of them good and useful, but too hastily adopted, and not in harmony with each other to be productive of a good result, until time has enabled their owners to class and arrange them.