eat up the saddlers-" Exprès, Messieurs, pour manger les selliers." He bore criticism with extreme complacency, provided it appeared to be dictated by good sense and justice; and I have seen him more ruffled at being told that he had made a mistake at a game of dominos (a favorite recreation of his), or that he had missed a coup at billiards (although from the shortness of his sight he could hardly see his ball at three feet distance from him), than by a severe examination of one of his most important performances. most difficult points in the art of acting: certainly it was conquered by Talma. Yet notwithstanding the general excellence of this performance, there were parts which forced upon you the recollection of his own expression; "There must be light and shade;" and, to confess the truth, the "shade" was deep and frequent. He was a tedious declaimer, and there did occur speeches of a hundred, or a hundred and fifty lines in length, which he delivered in one unvarying tone; and these were in tolerably fatiguing. Some part of this fault might be charged upon the vicious conAfter I had seen him play Hamlet, he struction of French tragedy, which delights was desirous that I should tell him what I in long declamatory tirades, and part upon thought of him in comparison with John the eternal jingle of the rhyme; yet a con- Kemble in the same character. The styles siderable portion of it must certainly reof these two great actors were as different main with the actor, who, although, in a from each other as the characters of the greater degree than any other French pertwo Hamlets; so it was scarcely possible to former, he possessed the art of disguising draw a comparison between them. Perhaps the monotony of the rhyme, he was cold (I the question could never strictly have been, had almost said tame) unless when excited which actor, but which style of acting do by a deep feeling or a powerful passion. you prefer? This I told him; and added, Then, to an eye long and till lately acthat if they could change places I thought customed to the noble presence of John they would both be in some respects gainers: Kemble to his action and attitudes, pic-that the quiet dignity of the French turesque, dignified, grand, sublime, as they were-Talma appeared inelegant, ungraceful, and sometimes uncouth. But the gestures of the French, as of the more southern nations, even as accompaniments to conversation, are rapid and violent; and much of that which had at first appeared to me unnatural and ungraceful, partly perhaps because it was un-English, I grew reconciled to as I became acquainted with its propriety and truth. Still, compared with his general excellence, these were but trifling blemishes; for in all the essentials of tragic acting Talma was- -in a word Talma. In private life Talma was amiable, cheerful, and unassuming. His manners were singularly unaffected and simple: had you seen him for the first time, in private, you would not have recognised in him the great tragedian. At home you saw him in his dressing-gown and slippers-he left the buskin and toga at the theatre. But though cheerful, and sometimes even playful, he did not premeditately set about being playful for the purpose of astonishing you by letting you see how wonderfully a great tragic actor could unbend! He was never gay but from sheer gaieté de cœur, and then the merest trifle would serve to amuse him. At dinner, one day, instead of asking for the salière, (the salt-cellar, as I intended), I asked for sellier. Talma burst out laughing, and said, “Oh! I knew that in England you eat the saddle of mutton, but I did not know that you eat the saddler." This served him as a joke for the rest of the evening, and to every body that came he introduced me as the Englishman who had come to France to tragedy would be favourable to the display of some of the qualities of Kemble, while the turbulent passions of our's would afford great opportunities to him (Talma): "Ah!" said he, with something between a groan and a sigh, "that is what I wantthe stiff rules, and the coldness of the French drama, cramp me-I have not room to throw myself out init is an ungrateful theatre [for drama] to me-I do all I can for it; it does little for me. Yes, I ought to have been an English actor; I want the liberty of your English stage, and to lutter -lutter-how do you say it?"— (Impatiently). "To wrestle."-"Yes, to wrestle-I want to wrestle with Shakspeare." At the Ambigue, a minor theatre, there was a man of the name of (I think) Frenoy, a melo-drame actor, so confirmed an imitator of Talma, that he had acquired the title of "the Talma of the Boulevard." This man's imitation of his great prototype was, in sober seriousness, what little Simmons's imitation of Kemble in Coriolanus was, in jest: that is to say, it was irresistibly droll. It is certain he considered himself as equal to Talma, if not, in some respects, superior; for at the Theatre Français he has been heard to express his approbation of him in such terms as-"Good-good-very good!" or, "There; that is as I wish him to be; he has pleased me to night." Speaking of him, Talma said, "If it were not for Potier, I should say that that man amuses me more than any actor in Paris. He is a little ME (c'est un petit moi); when I see him, it is like looking at myself in a crooked mirrorI see all my features, but I see them distorted. But the devil take him! he puzzlés me; for he makes me think, that unless I am a very fine actor, I must be altogether detestable." He was a great admirer of Potier, and went more frequently to the Variétés, where Potier at that time was in high force, than he did to any other theatre. "Potier," he once said, "is not a man, but a laugh: you look at his face, and laugh; you look at his legs, and laugh; he speaks, or is silent-you laugh he is angry or pleased, merry or sad -you laugh, laugh, laugh!" Of John Kemble, as a man, he always spoke in terms of affection-of unqualified respect for, and admiration of him as an actor. He entertained a high opinion, too, of points in Kean's acting. But his praises of Miss O'Neill were boundless. Certainly, the French stage could produce nothing at all comparable with her for sensibility, tenderness, and pathos-it possessed nothing so exquisitely feminine. The phrase currently attributed to him respecting that accomplished actress, that " she had tears in her voice,' he might have applied to her, but it was not his own; it had been used as the affected compliment to Mademoiselle Duchesnois for years before. It has been frequently said that Madame Pasta had received instructions from him. This is not true, in the sense intended to be implied. That Madame Pasta had deeply studied him there can be little doubt; and those who have seen that eminent artist in Medea, may form a tolerably good notion of what Talma was. Her acting, both for style and quality, approaches more nearly to his than any I ever saw. But she never received lessons from him. The first time he ever saw her perform was at the Italian theatre in Paris, and upon that occasion I had the pleasure of accompanying him. The opera was "Tancredi." In the early part of the piece, Tancredi (Madame Pasta) has a long scena with Amenaïde, during which, the performer has scarcely any thing to say. 66 Talma was deeply attentive; and, in reply to an expression of dissatisfaction uttered by a lady who was with him, he said, somewhat sharply, "Elle écoute bien, au moins." However odd it may seem, to listen well, is no slight qualification in an actor, as may be proved by its rarity. At the conclusion of the performance, he exclaimed, Allons, voilà une diablesse qui ira loin !" I shall conclude this paper by giving a copy of one of his English letters, the first, I believe, that has ever appeared in print. Yet I give it not so much as a specimen of his English, as because it is characteristic. The few errors in the original are here retained :— "Paris, April 4th, 1819. "MY DEAR SIR; "I have received your letter and I answer you by the return of post. The two works you mention are exactly those I wish to havet (they are in 8vos). I will take the three guineas' print of the Kemble's family. I return you many thanks for your kind offers. My wife would like to have two or three morning gowns of fancy muslin at a moderate price, say, from twenty to thirty shillings a-piece; but those kind of bargains are not under your cognizance, and I suppose you are a better smuggler than a buyer. Perhaps Mrs. would be so kind as to make that purchase. it will take very little place for you can put the whole in your shirt or in your hat. besides you have learnt me not to have the least doubt of your abilities in that line of trade. If you quit London in a fortnight you will not find me here at your arrival, for I set off to-morrow to pay a Visit to my Subjects of the South and levy my usual tribute. you will be so kind as to keep the objects you will bring over for me, till my return in Paris which will be about the middle of june. Pray our kind remembrance to Mr. and Mrs. and to all those who have not forgot me. "Believe me, my dear Sir, "N. B. In case you make the purchase of the gowns, you must take two yards more than ordinary for each, my wife not being of small dimension in length and breadth : besides our french women are partial to trimmings, furbelows, flounces, and I don't know what." + Danville's French and English Grammar. I had succeeded in conveying a silk gown from him to his sister in England. THE HIGH-BORN LADYE. IN vain all the knights of the Underwald woo'd her, Though brightest of maidens, the proudest was she; Brave chieftains they sought, and young minstrels they sued her, But none was found worthy of the high-born Ladye. “Whomsoever I wed," said this maid so excelling, "That knight must the conqueror of conquerors be; He must place me in halls fit for monarchs to dwell in, None else shall be bridegroom of the high-born Ladye!" Thus spoke the proud damsel, with scorn looking round her, On knights and on nobles of highest degree; Who humbly and hopelessly left as they found her, And sigh'd, at a distance, for the high-born Ladye. At length came a knight, from a far land to woo her, With plumes on his helm, like the foam of the His vizor was down-but with voice that thrill'd through her, sea: He whisper'd his greeting to the high-born Ladye. "Proud maiden! I come with high spousals to grace thee, her In pomp to his home, of that high-born Ladye. "But whither," she startling exclaims, "have you led me? Here's nought but a tomb and a dark cypress-tree: Is this the bright palace in which thou wouldst wed me?" With scorn in her glances, said the high-born Ladye. ""Tis the home," he replied, "of earth's loftiest creatures; Then lifted his helm for the fair one to see; But she sunk on the ground-'twas a skeleton's features, And Death was the bridegroom of the high-born THE JEW OF HAMAH.+ A TURKISH TALE. ONCE upon a time there lived in Hamah a certain Turk called Mustapha, who, having accumulated some wealth by carrying on a trade in goats' hair, determined to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. His family consisted of his wife and two slaves; and as the lady insisted on not being left behind, the good man resolved to sell off his stock of goats' hair, to take all his household with him, and +From Fuller's Turkish Narrative. London, 1830, VOL. IV. 2 A to shut up his house till his return. The only difficulty that presented itself was what to do with his money. He did not like to run the risk of being robbed of it in his journey through the desert, he did not like to leave it in an empty house, and there were not any of his friends to whom he wished to trust the secret of his wealth. After much deliberation he placed it in separate parcels at the bottom of five large earthen jars, which he then filled up with butter, and on his departure sent them to the house of one of his neighbours, a Jew named Mousa, to keep till his return, telling him that it was a stock which he had laid in for winter consumption. The Jew, however, from the weight of the jars and other circumstances, suspected that they contained something more valuable; and as soon as Mustapha was fairly on his way to Damascus to join the caravan, he ventured to open them; when finding his expectations realized, he took out the gold and filled them up again with butter so carefully, that nobody could tell that they had been disturbed. The poor Turk, on his return from the pil grimage, soon found out the trick that his neighbour had practised upon him; but as the jars were exactly in the same apparent state as when he left them, and as there was no evidence as to their contents, it was plain that no legal process could give him any redress. He therefore set about to devise some other way of punishing the Jew, and of recovering, if possible, his property; and in the mean time he did not com municate his loss to any person but his wife, and enjoined on her the strictest secrecy. After long consideration, a plan suggested itself. In one of his visits to the neighbouring town of Homs, where he was in the habit of going to sell his goats' hair to the manufacturers of the mashlakhs, for which that place is famous, he fell in with a troop of gypsies, who had with them an ape of extraordinary sagacity. He prevailed on them to sell him this animal; and conveying it privately to his house at Hamah, shut it up in a room to which no one but himself had access. He then went back to the bazar and bought one of the dark scanty robes and the small caps or kalpaks, with a speckled handkerchief tied closely round it, which is the prescribed costume of the Jews throughout the Turkish empire. This dress he took care invariably to put on whenever he went to visit his ape; and as he always carried him his meals, and indeed never allowed any other person to see him, the animal, in the course of a few weeks, became extremely attached to him, jumping on his neck and hugging and caressing him as soon as he entered the room. About this time, as he was walking along the streets one day, he met a lad, the son of the Jew ingly, as soon as it was dark, and he could go unobserved, he repaired to Mustapha's house, and offered, if he would liberate his son, to restore all the money which he had taken from the butter-jars. The Turk having attained his object, consented to release his prisoner; but in order to keep up his own credit, he stipulated that the child should be removed privately, and that the father, with his whole family, should immediately quit the place. The popular belief in the miracle thus remained unshaken; and so great was the disrepute into which the Jews fell in consequence of this adventure, that they all departed one after the other, and none have ever since been known to reside in Hamah. www COINCIDENCE IN PHYSIC AND Mousa, and having enticed him into his house by the promise of some figs, he shut him up a close prisoner in a detached apartment in his garden, at such a distance from the street and from the other houses in the town, that the boy could not discover to any one the place of his confinement. The Jew, after several days' search, not being able to obtain any tidings of him, concluded that he had either been drowned, or had strayed out of the town and fallen into the hands of some wandering Bedouins; and, as he was his only child, fell into a state of the greatest despair; till, at length, he heard by accident, that just about the time that the boy was missing, he had been seen walking in company with Hadgi Mustapha. The truth instantly flashed on his mind, and he recognised, in the loss of his son, some stratagem which the Turk had planned in revenge for the affair of the butter-jars. He immediately summoned him before the cadi, accused him of having the boy in his possession, and insisted on his immediately restoring him. Mustapha BETWEEN the greater and more marked at first strenuously denied the fact; but when one of the witnesses positively desects in physic, and those in divinity, there is clared that he saw the boy go into his a coincidence, that would be truly astounding house, and when the cadi was about to to any one not aware what a trumpery Jew'spronounce his decree, that he should bring harp the intellect of man really is, and how him into court dead or alive-"Yah illah, in medicine, who are perpetually absorbed in limited is its compass. Thus the expectants el Allah!" he exclaimed, "there is no God but Allah, and his power is infinite; he can the contemplation of phenomena, who rework miracles when it seemeth good in his ligiously abstain from all interference with sight. It is true, effendi," continued he, ad- the natural course of a disease, and retreat dressing himself to the cadi, "that I saw before the difficulties it presents, act precisely the Jew, Mousa's son, passing by my house; on the principle of the ascetics of the church, and for the sake of the old friendship sub- who refuse to contribute to the wants of sisting between his father and myself, I in- society, for fear they should succumb to the vited him to come in and to eat some figs world's temptations. The active practitioners, which I had just been gathering. The boy, on the contrary, who are perpetually interhowever, repaid my hospitality with rude- fering, and will never suffer nature to do any ness and abuse: nay, he even blasphemed thing for herself, are like the church militant, the name of our holy prophet; but scarcely which is ever on the alert to wrestle with the had the words passed his lips, when to devil, and takes on itself to direct the my surprise and horror, he was suddenly thoughts, words, and deeds, of every member changed into a monkey. In that form I will of the community over which it presides. produce him: and, as a proof that what I tell The Humoralists and the Solidists long diyou is true, you will see that he will imme- vided the world of medicine, as the Arians diately recognise his father." At this in- and the Athanasians did the western church. stant, a servant who was waiting on the Galen was in himself an entire council of outside, let loose the ape into the divan, who Trent, and governed the art despotically for seeing that the Jew was the only person ages, till Paracelsus set up the chemical present in the dress to which he was accus- heresy, and the triumphal car of antimony tomed, mistook him for his master, jumped drove through the ranks of ancient orthodox. upon him, and clung round his neck with The overthrow of the Aristotelian philo all the expressions of fondness which the sophy, like the reformation in the church, child might have been supposed to exhibit on opened a door to the infinity of minor sects being restored to his parent. Nothing more which have in turn distracted physic; and was wanting to convince the audience of the the present days of jacobinical free inquiry truth of Mustapha's story; "A miracle, a have not produced more dissent in religion real miracle!" they cried out, great is than they have in medicine. All the great Allah, and Mahomet is his prophet:" and nations of Europe have set up their own the Jew was ordered to take the monkey especial school of physic, each differing toto and retire from the court. A compromise was now his only resource; and, accord 66 From the New Monthly Magazine.-No. CXIII. cælo from the other, treating diseases in the most opposite ways, e sempre bene. Italy has its contra-stimulant creed, France its expectant creed; in England, the empirical faith prevails (a sort of independent, anabaptist anarchy), and the Germans are the ontologists of medicine. In this, the Germans and the English represent the realists and nominalists of the old school philosophy; the Anglicans, like the nominalists, practising at symptoms; and the Germans, like the realists, at an abstract entity. If theology has its Bible placed on the index at Rome, and reverentially studied at Geneva, medicine has its calomel, the god of English idolatry, anathematized and rejected by the canonists of Paris. But it is in England that a laxity of principle and a deplorable tolerance especially exist, and have multiplied sects alike in religion and in medicine, insomuch that it would be difficult to say with accuracy what is the state of public opinion in either department. Within the memory of the present generation many revolutions in medical doctrine have occurred. First, Cullen held an undisputed sway over the consciences of the expert, teaching that the hopes of the sick, like the spiritual hopes of the jumpers, were commensurate with the copiousness of their perspirations. Then came Brown, who cured all bodily diseases with brandy, as Orator Irving cures spiritual maladies with brimstone. Currie quenched a fever as he would a house on fire, and may be classed as a sort of medical baptist. Dr. Mills, the St. Dominick of physicians, compels his patients to get well by a profuse spilling of blood. Dr. Hamilton of Edinburgh founded a sect, which smacked strongly of the Romish confessional; for his fundamental maxim is, that none can be saved, without having first been put rigidly to their purgations. Again, as each individual divine has some sin which he takes into especial disgrace, as leading to perdition by the shortest possible cut, so every doctor lays the whole diseases of the nosology to the door of some peccant organ, on which he fixes as the arsenal of death. Formerly the spleen was the scape-goat of the economy; then the nerves were the sixteen-string Jacks of its criminal code. Saunders preached a crusade against the liver; Wilson Phillips excommunicated the stomach; and now the fashionable doctrine places every deadly symptom, like every mortal sin, to the account of a bad heart. Among the principal sectarians of modern times, no one is more known to the public than Abernethy. Who has not read his celebrated page 72? Who that has read it, can doubt that he drew his doctrines from a deep study of the monastic disciplinists? Like them, he places salvation in the morti fication of the appetites; and he sends his patients to the hospital, as the parable sent Dives to the unmentionable abyss, for faring sumptuously every day. With him, French cookery is an abomination, and gravy the forbidden thing. But, unlike the doctors of the church, he makes every day a jour maigre, and his Lent lasts all the year round. Then, what shall be said of the believers in metallic tractors, and of those that carry about their persons mercury hermetically sealed, as a prophylactic? Is not their error that of the followers of Johanna Southcoteand are not the magnetizing Mesmerites the pendant for the believers in Prince Hohenloe? There is a sect of doctors who devote themselves with much pertinacity to puffing particular watering-places. One finds Bath a cure for every ill, another recommends Cheltenham; one sends all his patients to Nice, and another suffers no one to die but on the coast of Devonshire. These men are the legitimate successors of the preachers of pilgrimages, who, during the middle ages, sent their penitents, one to St. James of Compostella, another to Our Lady of Loretto, another to St. Thomas à Becket, or to St. Patrick's Hole; just as if mankind were, body and soul, like a cask of Madeira, and ́ good for nothing till they had been half over the world. So closely, indeed, do the currents of medicine and divinity flow to each other, that they are continually in danger of breaking down their banks, and mingling their waters. We have heard professors of theology crying out with all their might "breakers a-head," and sounding the tocsin against the physiologists for theatening to overflow and muddy the stream of divinity with the impurities of their dissecting-rooms. So, likewise, we have heard certain maudlin professors of physic attempt to found their medical theories on the authority of Moses, and give to their lectures very much the tournure of a sermon. Then again, put a phrenologist into holy orders, and he would at once be converted into a predestination Calvinist. The coincidences, in short, between medicine and theology are endless; and it might have been conjectured, even if history had not assured us of the fact, that the two sciences were in the beginning practised by the same individuals. Thus, the same test is adopted to try the pretensions of the physician and the prophet; namely, the power of working miracles; and as the false prophets of old are said to have enacted wonders by the power of the father of lies, so the advertizing quacks of our days make miraculous cures by the self-same agency. Dr. Southey, and many other theologians, hold it dangerous to open the eyes of the people to acknowledged superstitions; because they consider them as outworks which guard the citadel of true religion from |