cken the noblesse, and the compositions of
the day are directed against the Throne, the Clergy, and Monastic Orders.
All the tyrants of past ages are brought from the shelves of faction and
pedantry, and assimilated to the mild and circumscribed monarchs of
modern Europe. The doctrine of popular sovereignty is artfully
instilled, and the people are stimulated to exert a power which they must
implicitly delegate to those who have duped and misled them. The frenzy
of a mob is represented as the sublimest effort of patriotism; and
ambition and revenge, usurping the title of national justice, immolate
their victims with applause. The tendency of such pieces is too obvious;
and they may, perhaps, succeed in familiarizing the minds of the people
to events which, a few months ago, would have filled them with horror.
There are also numerous theatrical exhibitions, preparatory to the
removal of the nuns from their convents, and to the banishment of the
priests. Ancient prejudices are not yet obliterated, and I believe some
pains have been taken to justify these persecutions by calumny. The
history of our dissolution of the monasteries has been ransacked for
scandal, and the bigotry and biases of all countries are reduced into
abstracts, and exposed on the stage. The most implacable revenge, the
most refined malice, the extremes of avarice and cruelty, are wrought
into tragedies, and displayed as acting under the mask of religion and
the impunity of a cloister; while operas and farces, with ridicule still
more successful, exhibit convents as the abode of licentiousness,
intrigue, and superstition.

These efforts have been sufficiently successful--not from the merit of
the pieces, but from the novelty of the subject. The people in general
were strangers to the interior of convents: they beheld them with that
kind of respect which is usually produced in uninformed minds by mystery
and prohibition. Even the monastic habit was sacred from dramatic uses;
so that a representation of cloisters, monks, and nuns, their costumes
and manners, never fails to attract the multitude.--But the same cause
which renders them curious, makes them credulous. Those who have seen no
farther than the Grille, and those who have been educated in convents,
are equally unqualified to judge of the lives of the religious; and their
minds, having no internal conviction or knowledge of the truth, easily
become the converts of slander and falsehood.

I