rme des beaux vers sans nuire jamais a la verite de
l'expression. En dechirant le coeur, il enchantait toujours l'oreille, sa
voix penetrait jusqu'au fond de l'ame, et l'impression qu'elle y
faisait, semblable a celle du burin, y laissait des traces et longs
souvenirs."

The tragedy of Hamlet, in which we saw Talma perform for the first time,
is one which must be interesting to every person who has any
acquaintance with French literature; and it will not probably be
considered as any great digression in a description of Talma's
excellencies as an actor, to add some further remarks concerning that
celebrated play in which his powers are perhaps most strikingly
displayed, and which is one of the greatest compositions undoubtedly of
the French theatre. It can hardly be called a translation, as many
material alterations were made in the story of the play; and though the
general purport of the principal speeches has been sometimes preserved,
the language and sentiments are generally extremely different. The
character of Shakespeare's Hamlet was wholly unsuited to the taste of a
French audience. What is the great attraction in that mysterious being
to the feelings of the English people, the strange, wild, and
metaphysical ideas which his art or his madness seems to take such
pleasure in starting, and the uncertainty in which Shakespeare has left
the reader with regard to Hamlet's real situation, would not perhaps
have been understood--certainly not admired, by those who were
accustomed to consider the works of Racine and Voltaire as the models of
dramatic composition. In the play of Ducis, accordingly, Hamlet thinks,
talks, and acts pretty much as any other human being would do, who
should be compelled to speak only in the verse of the French tragedy,
which necessarily excludes, in a great degree, any great incoherence or
flightiness of sentiment. In some respects, however, the French Hamlet,
if a less poetical personage, is nevertheless a more interesting one,
and better adapted to excite those feelings which are most within the
command of the actor's genius. M. Ducis has represented him as more
doubtful of the reality of the vision which haunted him, or at least of
the authority which had commissioned it for such dreadful
communications; and this alteration, so important in the hands of Talma,
was required on account of other changes which had been made in the
story of the play. The paramour of the Queen is not Hamlet's unc