neur d'être la première tragédienne de sa majesté le peuple français." Long seasons of rest for both body and spirit could alone have enabled her to be true to her own genius. These Rachel would not take until too late. Thus we find her in 1849 playing during three months that should have been given to repose in no fewer than thirty-five towns from one end of France to the other, and giving seventy performances in the course of ninety days. "Quelle route," she writes, "quelle fatigue, mais aussi quelle dot!" The day was not far off when she was doomed to feel in bitterness of heart how dearly this "dot" was purchased.

The temptation of wealth, which her European fame brought her, was no doubt great. The sums she received in England, Belgium, Holland, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, were enormous, and the adulation everywhere paid to her might have made the steadiest head giddy. At the staid court of Berlin she was received in 1853 with courtly honors. The emperor Nicholas of Russia ap

Rachel, as an artist, stood at her best between the years 1843 and 1847. From that time she sensibly fell off, and the reason of her doing so is obvious. She had set her mind more upon the improve-proached her, after a private performance ment of her fortune than of her skill as the interpreter of the great dramatists of her country. Her physical strength, never great, was lavishly expended on engagements in all quarters where money was to be picked up, and where she went on reiterating the same parts until they lost all freshness for herself, and, as a consequence, that charm of spontaneousness and truth which they had once possessed. It was in vain that wise friends like Samson and Jules Janin warned her against the ruin she was causing to her talent and to her health. The simple, self-centred life which they urged her to cultivate, of the true artist, to whom the consciousness of clearer perceptions and of finer execution, developed by earnest study, brings "riches fineless," was abandoned for the excitement of lucrative en

at Potsdam, with all the chivalrous gallantry which sate so gracefully upon him; and when she offered to rise as he ac costed her, took her by both hands and pressed her to remain seated, saying as he did so, "Asseyez vous, mademoiselle; les royautés comme la mienne passent, la royauté d'art ne passe pas." And when, in the following year, she went to Russia for six months, she not only brought back £12,000 as the solid gains of her visit, but such recollections of courtly homage paid to her, as she describes with admirable vivacity in the following letter from St. Petersburg to her sister Sarah: —

Yesterday evening your humble servant was entertained like a queen- -not a sham tragedy queen, with a crown of gilded pasteboard, but a real queen, duly stamped at the royal mint. First of all, realize to yourself the fact that here the Boyards all follow me, stare at me as if I were some strange animal, and that I cannot move a step without having them after me. In the streets, in the shops, wherever I go, or may be caught a glimpse of, I am marked and pointed at. I no longer belong to myself.

gagements constantly renewed, and of new circles of admirers serving up the incense of adulation in stimulating profusion. To this there could be but one end, and that a sad one. The strain upon the emotions of a great tragic actress, under the most favorable conditions, is To sum up all, the other day I was invited enough to tax the soundest constitution. to a banquet, given in my honor at the ImShe must" spurn delights, and live labo-perial Palace — a fact, oh daughter of papa rious days" to maintain her hold upon an What a regale! When I reached the palace, and mamma Félix! It came off yesterday. inexorable public, before whom she must always seem at her best. As Rachel her- and gold lace, just as in Paris, to wait upon lo, there were gorgeous footmen, all powder self says in writing to Madame de Girar- and escort me: one takes my pelisse, another din (2d May, 1851), "On ne mange pas goes before and announces me, and I find mytoujours quand on veut, lorsqu'on a l'hon- I self in a saloon gilded from floor to ceiling,

with everybody rushing to salute me. It is a grand duke, no less, the emperor's brother, who advances to offer me his hand to conduct me to the dinner-table-an immense table, raised upon a sort of dais, but not laid out for many-only thirty covers; but the guests, how select! The imperial family, the grand dukes, the little dukes, and the archdukes-all the dukes, in short, of all calibres; and all this tra-la-la of princes and princesses, curious and attentive, devouring me with their eyes, watching my slightest movements, my words, my smiles, in a word, never keeping their eves Well! Do not imagine that I was in any way embarrassed. Not the least in the world! I felt just as usual - -at least up to the middle of the repast, which, moreover, was

off me.

Triumphant, however, as in one point of view was Rachel's visit to Russia, it had its heavy drawbacks. She returned to Paris more shaken than ever in health, and the failure in vigor was quickly perCeived when she resumed her place upon the stage there. The public, moreover, were out of humor with her for having forsaken them so long-she had been away a year—and they marked their displeasure by leaving her to play to comparatively empty houses. A new piece, Rosemonde," in which she sustained the principal part, was coldly received; and an epigram of the day tells the tale both of her broken health and of the eclipse of her popularity:—

Pourquoi donc nomme-t-on ce drame Rose

monde ?

Je n'y vois plus de rose et n'y vois pas de

monde.

excellent. But everybody seemed to be much more occupied with me than with the viands. At that point the toasts in my honor begin; and very strange indeed is the spectacle which ensues. The young archdukes, to get a better view of me, quit their seats, mount upon the chairs, and even put their feet upon the table -I was about to say into the plates!—and "The Czarine," written for her by yet nobody seemed the least surprised, there Scribe- the last of the characters crebeing obviously some traces of the savage stillated, as the phrase is, by Rachel - in the even in the princes of this country! And then the shouts, the deafening bravos, and the following year, was not more successful. calls upon me to recite something! To reply The wrong she had done to her body and to toasts by a tragic tirade was indeed strange; but I was equal to the occasion. I rose, and, pushing back my chair, assumed the most tragic air of my répertoire, and treated them to Phèdre's great scene. Straightway a deathlike silence; you might have heard the flutter of a fly, if there be such a thing in this country. They all listened devoutly, bending to wards me, and confining themselves to admiring gestures and stifled murmurs. Then, when I had finished, there was a fresh outbreak of shouts of bravos, of clinking glasses, and fresh toasts, carried so far that for the moment I felt bewildered. Soon, however, I too caught the infection, and excited at once by the odor of the wine and of the flowers, and of all this enthusiasm, which had the effect of tickling what little pride I have, I rose again and began to sing, or rather declaimed, the Russian national hymn with no small fervor. On this it was no longer enthusiasm, but utter frenzy; they crowded round me, they pressed my hands, they showered thanks upon me; I was the greatest tragedian in the world, and of all time past and future, and so on for a good quarter of an hour.

But the best things have an end, and the hour came for me to take my leave. I effected this with the same queenly dignity as I had managed my arrival, reconducted even to the grand staircase by the same grand duke, who was very gallant, but maintained at the same time all ceremonious respect. Then appeared the gorgeous footmen in powder, one of them carrying my pelisse. I put it on, and was escorted by them to my carriage, which was surrounded by other footmen carrying torches to illuminate my departure.

to her great natural gifts was now to be avenged. "Glory," she writes to a friend even in 1854, "is very pleasant, but its value is greatly lowered in my eyes, since I have been made to pay so dearly for it." Years before she had been warned. In 1847 she had written, "I have had great success, but how? At the expense of my health, of my life! This intoxication with which an admiring public inspires me, passes into my veins and burns them up." But this alone would not have wrought the havoc which by 1855 was visible in her person and in her general powers. Things had come to a serious pass with her, when in that year she wrote to M. Emile de Girardin:

Houssaye told me it was he who gave you the little Louis XV. watch, which you have arranged so daintily by replacing the glass, through which one could see the entrails of the beast, by the enamel in which they have had your humble servant baked. I think, and so does Sarah, the lower part of my face too long. But enamels (émails) or rather émaux

-for everywhere there are des maux-cannot be corrected once they have gone through the fire. In any case I think it is a thing not to be worn except after my death. I am so shaky that perhaps this is not very far off. If Madame de Girardin would write for me the part of some consumptive historical personage, if such there befor I delight in a part with a name to it - I believe I should play it well, and in a way to draw tears, for I should shed them myself. It is all very fine to tell

me this is only my nerves; I feel very surely | motto. I am grateful to you, dear Mlle. there is a screw loose somewhere. We spoke Brohan, for the kind interest you exof the watch; when one turns the key too press; but let me assure you, God alone strongly, something goes crack! I often feel can do anything for me! I start almost something go crack within me when I screw immediately for the South, and hope its myself up to act. The day before yesterday, in "Horace," when I was giving Maubant his pure and warm air will ease my pains a cue, I felt this crack. Yes, my friend, I little." Very touching are the words of a cracked. This quite entre nous, because of letter to another friend, written at the my mother and the boys. same time:

Next winter was spent in Egypt with no abatement of the fatal symptoms. She returned to France, feeling that her work Rachel died upon the 3d of January, in life was done, and that she would be 1858, conscious to the end. She was for"doomed to go in company with pain" tified in her last moments by the very imfor whatever term of life might be vouch-pressive ceremonial of the Jewish Church, safed her. In October.she left Paris for Cannet, a few miles from Cannes, where the father of M. Victorien Sardou had placed his villa at her disposal. Before quitting Paris she wrote to her friend and fellow-worker, Augustine Brohan: "Patience and resignation have become my

cumstances of her life, and the absence of that early moral training by which she might have been moulded into a nobler womanhood. Pauvre Rachel!

was essentially a declamatory actress; she depended but little on the emotions of the scene; she cared not at all how she was acted up to. She could not listen well; she did not kindle by conflict with the other characters. Nothing to our mind more clearly indicates the actress of a grade not certainly the highest. The classical French drama demands this power less than our own, but it does demand it in some degree. To excel on our stage, however, it is indispensable that the actress should possess the power of kindling, and, as she kindles, of rising, naturally and continuously, through the gradations of emotion and passion, which our more complex dramatic situations demand, and of sustaining these, so as to retain her hold upon the audience, after the voice has ceased to speak. But to do this, something more than the accomplishment of art is necessary; and this something is a deep and sincere sensibility, and a moral nature which answers instinctively to the call of the nobler feelings, that constitute the materials of tragedy, and also of comedy of the highest kind. It is easy to see that Rachel, with her lack of high intellectual culture, and her undisciplined moral nature, could never have met the demands of the Shakespearian drama. Nor, seeing what she was as a woman, how little she possessed of the finer and more tender graces of her sex, can we wonder that she failed, as she did, in parts in which Mars or Duchesnois had succeeded, and erred so frequently in accepting others from which true taste and right womanly feeling would have made her recoil.

As an artist the want of that moral element prevented her from rising to the highest level. Had she possessed it, she must have gone on advancing in excellence to the last. But this she did not do. Even in such parts as Phèdre and Hermione she went back instead of forward. Impersonations that used to be instinct with life became hard and formal. They were still beautiful as studies of histrionic skill, but the soul had gone out of them. A low moral nature—and such assuredly was Rachel's will always be felt through an artist's work, disguise it how he will, for, as Sir Thomas Browne says, "The brow often speaks true, eyes have tongues, and the countenance proclaims the heart and inclinations:" and, as we have already said, it shone through the acting of Rachel whenever the part was one in which the individuality of the woman came into play. It was this which made her range so limited. Attired in classical costume, and restricted to a style of action which masked that natural deportment which is ever eloquent of character, her hard and unsympathetic nature was for the time lost to view; and the eye was riveted by motions, graceful, stately, passionate, or eager, and the ear thrilled by the varied cadences or vehement declamation of her beautiful voice. But when her parts approached nearer to common life - when the emotions became more complex and less dignified the want was quickly felt. If, instead of Corneille and Racine, Rachel had been called upon to illustrate Shakespeare, with all the variety of inflection and subtlety of development which his heroines demand in the performer, she must, we believe, have utterly failed. We in England thought too little of this and it is a mis- BY MRS. PARR, AUTHOR OF "ADAM AND EVE.”

take which we have made, not in her case alone in our admiration of a style which to us was new and only half understood, and we placed her on a pinnacle above our own actresses higher than her deserts. We fell into the same mistake, and less excusably, in the case of Ristori, an artist of powers in every way inferior. The Parisians, wiser than ourselves, found out their mistake in this respect many years ago, as soon as they saw Ristori in Lady Macbeth. Rachel was too accomplished an artist, and knew the limits of her own powers too well, ever to risk her reputation by subjecting it to such a test. She

ROBIN.

From Temple Bar.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

FROM the time he was ten years old the epoch of that terrible fever Christopher Blunt had never enjoyed good health; but the worry of ways and means, the harass of business, the struggle to get on, had been spared him. Everything he wanted he had, everything he wished for he got. Suddenly a check was put on all this. Although he continued to write to his father, more than once referring to his fast-dwindling resources, there came no answer. What was to be done? The arrangements by which he was to have