Note 11 — ESSAY II. THE EDUCATION OF THE EMOTIONS.

In Dr. Ingleby’s just published Essays there is a very pertinent story from Saint Augustine concerning this contagion of the emotion of cruelty. A certain Alypius detested, on report, the spectacle of the Gladiators, but was induced to enter the amphitheatre, protesting that he would not look at the show: “So soon as he saw the blood,” says Saint Augustine, “he therewith drank down savageness; nor turned away, but fixed his eye, drinking in pleasure unawares, and was delighted with that guilty fight, and intoxicated with the bloody pastime; nor was he now the man he came, but one of the throng he came into.”—Saint Augustine’s Confessions, Bk. vi., c. 8. Similar perversions occur at all brutal exhibitions. A friend sends me the following instance from his own knowledge. “A party of English people went to the Bull Ring of San Sebastian. When the first horse was ripped up and his entrails trailed on the ground, a young lady of the party burst into tears and insisted on going away. Her brothers compelled her to remain; and a number of horses were then mutilated and killed before her eyes. Long before the end of the spectacle the girl was as excited and delighted as any Spaniard in the assembly.”