eatest tragedy ever originated in the Italian
language. It attains a superb height, for it keeps an equal pace with
the severe simplicity of the Bible narrative on which it is founded. It
depicts the condition of an imaginative mind, a stately and robust
character, an arrogant, fiery spirit, a kind heart, and a royal and
regally poised nature, that have first been undermined by sin and the
consciousness of sin, and then crazed by contact with the spirit world
and by a nameless dread of the impending anger of an offended God. It
would be difficult to conceive of a more distracting and piteous state.
Awe and terror surround that august sufferer, and make him both holy and
dreadful. In his person and his condition, as those are visible to the
imaginative mind, he combined elements that irresistibly impress and
thrill. He is of vast physical stature, that time has not bent, and of
great beauty of face, that griefs have ravaged but not destroyed. He is
a valiant and sanguinary warrior, and danger seems to radiate from his
presence. He is a magnanimous king and a loving father, and he softens
by generosity and wins by gentleness. He is a maniac, haunted by
spectres and scourged with a whip of scorpions, and his red-eyed fury
makes all space a hell and shatters silence with the shrieks of the
damned. He is a human soul, burdened with the frightful consciousness
of Divine wrath and poised in torment on the precipice that overhangs
the dark, storm-beaten ocean of eternity. His human weakness is frighted
by ghastly visions and indefinite horrors, against which his vain
struggle only makes his forlorn feebleness more piteous and drear. The
gleams of calm that fall upon his tortured heart only light up an abyss
of misery--a vault of darkness peopled by demons. He is already cut off
from among the living, by the doom of inevitable fate, and while we pity
him we fear him. His coming seems attended with monstrous shapes; he
diffuses dissonance; his voice is a cry of anguish or a wail of
desolation; his existence is a tempest; there can be no relief for him
save death, and the death that ends him comes like the blessing of tears
to the scorched eyelids of consuming misery. That is the Saul of the
Bible and of Alfieri's tragedy; and that is the Saul whom Salvini
embodied. It was a colossal monument of human suffering that the actor
presented, and no one could look upon it without being awed and
chastened.

Salvini's embodiment of King L