and, as we place the ottoman
under our feet, to steady and complete our repose.

We will at once introduce a striking quotation from the author before
us, which has immediate reference to the _Lucrece Borgia_ of Victor
Hugo. To those who have not read the play it is only necessary to
observe, in order to understand what follows, that Victor Hugo, with
that violent effort after a moral novelty which distinguishes him, has
chosen to represent the infamous Lucretia Borgia as under the influence
of maternal love, while in all other respects she fully sustains her
odious and infernal reputation.

The author wished, he tells us in his preface, to retrieve
the moral deformity of Lucretia Borgia by the beauty of the
maternal sentiment; he wished, according to his own
energetic expression, 'to place the mother in the monster.'
Here let us make a distinction. I admire the tenderness
which the most ferocious animals have for their offspring,
and when the dying lioness covers her young with her wounded
and bleeding body, I admire and am moved. But a woman who is
a mother ought, in her tenderness to her children, to have
more intelligence, more of elevation of thought, than the
lioness. Instinct is not enough; there must be a sentiment,
a sentiment which does not exclude, but perfects and
purifies the instinct. Thus, when in Florence, a mother cast
herself in desperation before the lion who had taken her
child, and the lion, astonished at her despair, or perhaps
comprehending it, replaced the infant at her feet, it was
instinct which impelled the mother, and it was probably
instinct in the lion which responded to her. But good
instincts, whatever admirable actions they may occasionally
produce, are but the germ and commencement of human virtues;
they are indeed radically distinguished from human virtue by
this, that, of themselves, however strong, they are sterile:
a good instinct dwells by the side of a bad without effort
to reform or to purify it, and equally without danger of
being itself perverted. One virtue only in a vicious
character might convert it entirely to virtue, as one vice
only in a virtuous might lead it to utter depravation. But
an instinct, however good, supports without disquietude the
neighbourhood of evil, and it is thus that, in Lucretia
Borgia, the mother an