and difficulties with which the audi|ence foresee that its gratification is likely to be attended.
The reserve which the laws of society impose upon the fair sex, with regard to this weakness, renders it more peculiarly distressful in them, and, upon that very account, more deeply interesting. We are charmed with the love of Phaedra, as it is expressed in the French tragedy of that name, notwithstanding all the extra|vagance and guilt which attend it. That very extravagance and guilt may be said, in some measure, to recommend it to us. Her fear, her shame, her remorse, her horror, her despair, become thereby more natural and interesting. All the seconda|ry passions, if I may be allowed to call them so, which arise from the situation of love, become necessarily more furious and violent: and it is with these secondary passions only that we can properly be said to sympathize.
Of all the passions, however, which are so extravagantly disproportioned to the va|lue of their objects, love is the only one that appears, even to the weakest minds, to have any thing in it that is either
