then an
infant. He had the child educated as his sister, and she grew to be a
woman, ignorant of her real origin. In the meantime, she has offers of
marriage, all of which she unaccountably refuses. In fine, she was
secretly cherishing a passion for her guardian _and supposed brother_;
an explanation is had, they marry, and the piece closes. I objected to
the probability of a well-educated young woman's falling in love with a
man old enough to be selected as her guardian, when she was an infant,
and against whom there existed the trifling objection of his being her
own brother.

"But he was _not_ her brother--not even a relative." "True; but she
_believed_ him to be her brother." "And nature--do you count nature as
nothing?--a _secret sentiment_ told her he was not her brother." "And
use, and education, and an _open sentiment_, and all the world told her
he was. Such a woman was guilty of a revolting indelicacy and a heinous
crime, and no exaggerated representation of love, a passion of great
purity in itself, can ever do away with the shocking realities of such a
case."

I found no one to agree with me. He was _not_ her brother, and though
his tongue and all around her told her he was, her heart, that
infallible guide, told her the truth. What more could any reasonable man
ask?

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