Mrs. S. is a superannuated, prudish beauty. She has survived her _attraits_ without perceiving their dereliction, and what seems as odd, those about her are equally dim-sighted. Her sister, Ld. L., and even Miss Fox, speak of her charms as they might have done 15 years ago. She is what a lively Frenchman called ‘demoiselle froide.’ She has no conversation, and her understanding, like Ld. Burleigh’s, must be taken upon trust, as she is too profound to open. Those who live with her say she has wonderful capacity, but as it is known to only 2 or 3 persons, she must submit to the aspersion of being suspected of great dulness. _Au reste_, I believe she is a good sort of person. Her eagerness to marry Smith, and delight at having done so, betray more warmth than by her cold exterior one may presume. She likes to be suspected of feeling. I suspect there is not a more inveterate lover of pleasure than a well-matured prude; great prudery generally argues a more than usual warmth of constitution. The wearer of prudery, being conscious there is much to hide, falls into the extreme of reserve, whereas a naturally-disposed person is not troubled with any forbidden temptations, and appears lively and sprightly without fear of incurring severe observations. The rage for German plays still continues. The stage abounds with them, and the press is loaded with translations, and some, in point of morality, very questionable. One of the causes that create them in Germany occasions their being relished here. The same dull apathy of character that demands something extraordinary to rouse it subsists in both countries, as we have nothing to boast on the score of liveliness beyond the good, dull Germans. The first German play I ever saw was at Innspruck. I did not understand a word that was said, but the incidents diverted me as much as the pantomime in a harlequin farce. Ye first four acts were crowded with murders by poisoning, strangling, stabbing, occasional screams, starts, and trapdoors; the fifth had all the solemn parade of _bourgeois_ death, the exposition of a corpse in a coffin, with all the relations, just as Partridge would have them, crying around. But mark the catastrophe. Just as the mournful attendants were going to assign the apparently breathless heroine to her peaceful mansion, up she jumped, to the great discomfiture of the surrounding parties, and to ye admiration of the audience strutted about in her shroud.