644 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES ON THE LATE F. J. TALMA. 



in the third act is alone upon the stage, ruminating that inspired so- 

 liloquy " To be, or not to be," when he comes to the lines 

 " La mort, c'est le sommeil. C'est un reveil peut-etre, 



Peut-etre ! Ah ! c'est le mot qui glace, epouvante, 



L* homme, au bord du cercueil, par le doute arrete; 



Devant ce vaste abime il se jette en arriere 



Ressaisit 1'existence et s'attache a la terre" 



Talma stood motionless, or, if he made any movement, 'twas but 

 first to raise his head slightly towards heaven, and then to turn again 

 down to earth, as if to question them as to the nature of death. He 

 was wholly absorbed in meditation : there he stood, a single man in 

 the midst of thousands hushed in silence, ruminating on the after-fate 

 of mortality 



" To be, or not to be." 



In the scene wherein Hamlet conjures his mother, over the urn 

 which encloses the ashes of her husband, to confess that she had no 

 part in his death, a guilty conscience displays the troubled secret of 

 her soul ; and when, after entreaties on one side, and dreadful hesi- 

 tations and misgivings on the other, she at length discloses the fatal 

 truth, Hamlet draws the dagger which, by paternal command, he is 

 about to plunge into the breast of her who, with all her load of guilt 

 and crime, is still his mother ! the trial becomes too much for filial 

 feeling and filial pity, though enlisted in the cause and urged on by 

 the command of a dead father ; and he suddenly turns from the ap- 

 palling deed to his father's shade, and implores it, in the deepest ac- 

 cents of grief, to revoke the dreadful sentence ; then, throwing him- 

 self at his mother's feet, he falls extended before her, giving vent to 

 his agonized feelings in these words: 



c( Votre crime est horrible, execrable, odieux ; 

 Mais il n'est pas plus grand que la bonte des cieux." 



The transition from the expression of horror conveyed in the first, 

 to the calm resignation and hope implied in the second line, can only 

 have been thoroughly felt in the action and utterance of Talma. 



His enemies, however, now^(1794) renewed the disgraceful attacks 

 with which they had some time previously assailed him, on the un- 

 just grounds of his being a jacobin and a revolutionary partizan ; 

 and, on the 1st of February of this year, when he enacted the part 

 of Nero, no sooner had he appeared upon the scene than, instead of 

 being, as usual, hailed with hearty cheers, he was assailed with hiss- 

 ings and hootings, and every demonstration of displeasure, by an 

 infuriated audience. Talma, indignant at this unmerited treatment, 

 stepped forward ; and, in a tone in which manly firmness and wounded 

 feeling were mingled, silenced his reckless accusers with these few 

 but emphatic words : " Fellow-citizens, I am now, and I shall ever 

 continue to be, the ardent lover of freedom ; but I have ever held 

 crime and bloodshed in the utmost detestation and horror. The 

 reign of terror has cost me more tears than I shall ever choose to tell 

 you of. All my friends are dead upon the scaffold!" But, although 

 the envious tongue of detraction was silenced for the moment, his 

 success had roused too much opposition to be so easily put down. 

 Some among his detractors, more base than the rest, had set afloat 



