jealousy, and a fierce love which
seems in its excess allied to all the evil which sometimes springs from
that bittersweet root. [I shall never forget the first time I ever heard
Mademoiselle Rachel speak. I was acting my old part of Julia, in "The
Hunchback," at Lady Ellesmere's, where the play was got up for an
audience of her friends, and for her especial gratification. The room
was darkened, with the exception of our stage, and I had no means of
discriminating anybody among my audience, which was, as became an
assembly of such distinguished persons, decorously quiet and
undemonstrative. But in one of the scenes, where the foolish heroine, in
the midst of her vulgar triumph at the Earl of Rochdale's proposal, is
suddenly overcome by the remorseful recollection of her love for
Clifford, and almost lets the earl's letter fall from her trembling
hands, I heard a voice out of the darkness, and it appeared to me almost
close to my feet, exclaiming, in a tone the vibrating depth of which I
shall never forget, "_Ah, bien, bien, tres bien!_"] Mademoiselle
Rachel's face is very expressive and dramatically fine, though not
absolutely beautiful. It is a long oval, with a head of classical and
very graceful contour; the forehead rather narrow and not very high; the
eyes small, dark, deep-set, and terribly powerful; the brow straight,
noble, and fine in form, though not very flexible.

I was immensely struck and carried away with her performance of
"Hermione," though I am not sure that some of the parts did not seem to
me finer than the whole, as a whole conception. That in which she is
unrivalled by any actor or actress I ever saw is the expression of a
certain combined and concentrated hatred and scorn. Her reply to
Andromaque's appeal to her, in that play, was one of the most perfect
things I have ever seen on the stage: the cold, cruel, acrid enjoyment
of her rival's humiliation,--the quiet, bitter, unmerciful exercise of
the power of torture, was certainly, in its keen incisiveness, quite
incomparable. It is singular that so young a woman should so especially
excel in delineations and expressions of this order of emotion, while in
the utterance of tenderness, whether in love or sorrow, she appears
comparatively less successful; I am not, however, perhaps competent to
pronounce upon this point, for Hermione and Emilie, in Corneille's
"Cinna," are not characters abounding in tenderness. Lady M---- saw her
the other day in "Ma