Colley Cibber is the best theatrical critic we know, but if he had been asked to describe Rachel, we should fancy him falling into one of his old regrets. 'Could how Rachel spoke be as easily known as what she spoke, then might you see the muse of Racine in her triumph, with all her beauties in their best array, rising into real life and charming her beholders. But, alas! since all this is so far out of the reach of description, how shall I show you Rachel?'

The best attempt we have been able to make, is printed on the opposite page. Truth to say, a good portrait, such as one may bind up with one's copy of Racine, is the only tolerable criticism after all. So, gentle reader, there is Rachel for you: and to flatter your national likings, if you have any, she is in the dress of Mary Stuart, though the woes of Mary Stuart are not in Racine.

Quiet, earnest, intense, with a look of passion that has its spring in tenderness, that is just the expression she should wear. It pervaded all her performances, because in all of them she was the Woman. There it was, as you see it, when she said for this unhappy Mary that she was ready to go to death, for that all which could bind her to the earth had passed away; and as she said it, there came with its choking denial to her heart a sense of the still living capacity for joy or grief about to be quenched for ever. She wore that look, when, in Camille, she recalled the transient and deceitful dream wherein everything had spoken of her lover, and whispered happy issue to her love. It spread its mournful radiance over her face, when, for the wronged and deserted Hermione, she told the betrayer that she had loved him in his inconstancy, and with what something surpassing love would she have rewarded his fidelity.

Exquisitely perfect, let us say, was that performance of Hermione. Sometimes, it will not be heretical to whisper, her genius nodded or even slept: never here. The Roxane would not suffer her to do justice to her finest qualities: in the Emilie (for she was wilful) she refused herself that justice: in the Marie Stuart she was unequal: in Camille, always great undoubtedly, she had yet a very limited range: but in Hermione, she achieved a triumph of high and finished art, which will never fade from the recollections of those who witnessed it. It occurs to us, as we write, that it was in this very Hermione the famous Mademoiselle de ChampmelÉ won the heart of Racine himself, who, after the performance, flung himself at her feet in a transport of gratitude, which soon merged into love. Luckless Rachel, that ChampmelÉ should have been beforehand with her. How the poet would have shaken out love and gratitude upon her, from every curl of his full-bottomed peruke!

You have heard, no doubt, good reader—if you have not seen this accomplished Frenchwoman—that she is a scold, a fury, a womanly Kean, in a constant fret of passion. Do not believe it. Her forte is tenderness: she is much greater in the gentle grasp with which she embraces the whole intention of a part, than in the force with which she gives distinct hits: she is more at home in those emotions we call domestic, than in those which walk away from home on very lofty stilts. How the false notion obtained currency, we do not know. The French critics are men of lively imaginations, and it was perhaps natural that the feeling of that start of surprise with which Rachel broke upon them, should seek to ally itself to the occasionally sudden and terrible, the flighty and impetuous, rather than to the various tenderness and quiet truth which gave the actress her lasting victory.

What Rachel was before she was the first actress of France, probably the reader knows. She sold oranges on the Boulevards. Her name was Rachel Felix—an augury of fortune. An early hankering for the stage took her to the Gymnase in 1837, where she played bad parts badly enough. Not without a gleam of something beyond, however: for Sanson the actor happened to see her there, and thought it worth while to take her into teaching. He cured her of a false accent (she was a Swiss Jewess), and brought her out at the Francais in 1838, upon a salary of four thousand francs. She took the audience by storm, and her four thousand went up to a hundred and fifty thousand. Long may she flourish, to deserve and to enjoy them.