been foiled in my endeavour by the impossibility of discovering sufficient literal criticism either in French or in English. In this I have been thwarted, but I have collected, I think, a sufficient number of passages to exemplify the general feeling exhibited by the press towards Rachel, and thus make good my assertion. It would be useless for me to conceal the fact that I have here and there come across passages which seem to be in opposition to my view-passages penned by critics who appear to have found in Rachel's Phèdre those qualities which I do not suppose really existed there; but I would add that in many articles where I have been struck with the coincidence of the critic's views with my own, I have had the satisfaction of learning that the author was one who was entitled to credence. Oral evidence also supports me.

For a general idea of the main features of Rachel's acting, I must refer my readers to the famous chapter headed Vashti' in Charlotte Bronte's Villette. Rachel was undoubtedly a remarkable phenomenon. By her own unaided genius she brought back the French tragic muse to Paris after an absence of, I think, ten years. She drew greater crowds to hear her than even Talma had done. But her power was not sufficiently varied to keep them at her feet; she tried play after play and failed in them. She never really gained the sympathy of her audience; for that which a Frenchman prizes so highly, the expression of pathos, was, except with peculiar qualification, foreign to her dramatic nature. The criticisms which are known to most of us, and very delightful they are, are Alfred de Musset's. He finds pathos in her acting; but it must be remembered that he wrote from a personal knowledge of Rachel, and at a time when her youth, her poverty, and her simplicity of living cast a sort of pathetic charm about her. He wrote at a time when Rachel was tender over the reputation of her fellow-actresses, and when she was disgusted with the vulgarity of Corneille for writing such a line as On peut changer d'amant, mais non changer d'époux.

But it was not till many years after this that she played Phèdre. The truer view will be found in the following extracts from criticisms on Rachel's rendering of that character.

Athenæum:

It would be impossible to speak of Rachel as a careless or meagre actress, but it is as impossible to deny that she is monotonous. Nature has bound her round with bars of adamant through which her genius either cannot or will not break. The softer affections and tenderer emotions, which give even a redeeming grace to Lady Macbeth and Shylock, seem to be as far beyond Rachel's grasp as ever. She awes more than moves us: her power corrodes, but does not subdue. Few spells as strong as hers leave us with as little wish for their repetition.

Four years previously the same paper said:

With every intention to display the intensity of her passion for Hippolyte, she has neither sufficient tenderness nor fascination in her control. She moves a fiend,

not a gorgeous queen-destroyed, not intoxicated, by her fatal desires. With all her grace, dignity, and intensity, we felt she was hardly on her own ground till she turns on Enone with 'Malheureuse,' &c. It is impossible for art to go further than this.

The Times marks the realistic manner in which Rachel depicted the physical condition of Phèdre in the first act: The state of suffering, the weakness of the limbs, and the utter hopelessness of heart are exquisitely rendered by Rachel, who gives to every syllable a mournful expression.' The paper also adds a similar criticism of the portrayal of the decline of physical power at the end of the play. I will also add, at the risk of wearying my readers, quotations from three authors who are pre-eminently qualified to form a judgment in the matter-Macready, Madame de B--, Rachel's biographer, and Mr. George Lewes.

Macready's Diaries, 1847:

It was a very striking performance, all intensity, all in a spirit of vehemence and fury, that made one feel a want of keeping. I could have fancied a more selfcontained performance, more passionate fondness-not frenzy-in her love, and more pathos. I could imagine a performance exciting more pity for the character than she inspired, and equal effect in the scenes of rage and despair.

Speaking of the first representation by Rachel of Phèdre, Madame de B—— says, in allusion to Rachel's immediate predecessor in the character:

Mademoiselle Duchesncis was, certes, very inferior in some points to her young successor, but she possessed qualities most indispensable to tragedy, of which Rachel was entirely destitute she had from nature the faculty of expressing tenderness in its most moving form, depth of feeling in its most sympathetic, heartstirring, passionate moods. Phèdre, the role of her début, had remained her favourite one throughout her long career, and she had never acted it without drawing tears from every spectator (?).

Again of Phèdre in 1854, when some people considered that Rachel was at her best, Madame de B- gives the following description:

She concentrated the tragedy on herself. She embodied the event, began and developed it, foreshadowed the end. She incarnated the character, the action. When she appeared as Phèdre, bending under the weight of the diadem that burned that brow like a fiery circle, shrinking from the veils that enrobed her, she was the type of suffering, the living image of Destiny's victim: her curse and her crime are present throughout the play.

I cannot imagine a more truthful description of Euripides' Phædra than this.

Mr. George Lewes ends my list:

Rachel's range, like Kean's (he says in Actors and Acting) was very limited, but her expression was perfect within that range. Scorn, triumph, rage, lust, and merciless malignity, she could represent in symbols of irresistible power; but she had little tenderness, no womanly caressing softness, no gaiety, no heartiness. She was so graceful and so powerful that her air of dignity was incomparable; but somehow you always felt in her presence an indefinable suggestion of latent wickedness.

The portion of Mr. Lewes' paper which refers to Phèdre was copied from an earlier paper of his, written in 1850, from which I shall quote in preference as being slightly more explicit :

Nothing finer could be seen than this picture of the unutterable mournfulness and yielding despair of a soul torn with an incestuous passion, conscious of its guilt, struggling with its guilt, yet so filled, moved, possessed by it, that the verse, C'est Vénus tout entière à sa proie attachée,' was realised. Her appearance as she entered, wasting away with the fire that consumed her, standing on the verge of the grave, her face pallid, her eyes hot, her hands and arms emaciated, filled us with a ghastly horror. . . . In the second act (the declaration) Rachel was transcendent. There was a subtle indication of the diseased passion, of its fiery but unhealthy, irresistible and yet odious character, in the febrile energy with which she portrayed it. It was terrible in its vehemence and abandonment, eloquent in its horror, fierce and rapid as if the thoughts were crowding upon her brain in tumult, and varied with such amazing compass of tones that when she left the scene our nerves were quivering with an excitement almost insupportable.

This ends my list of quotations, which I think will prove my point as far as any point can be proved by quoting the opinions of others, that the Phèdre of Rachel was strong in those parts alone which bear resemblance to the Greek. But I have shown what relation they have to the whole play.

It is not my purpose to enter into detailed criticism of Madame Sarah Bernhardt's rendering of the character, since most of those who are interested in such matters must have seen it again and again. M. Sarcey gives it as the opinion of those of his acquaintance who have seen both actresses that in the first three acts Rachel is surpassed. It is in these acts that the qualities of Madame Bernhardt supply the deficiencies of Rachel; and it is in the last two acts that the characteristics of the Greek Phædra are predominant, notwithstanding the fact that they possess nothing of the Greek original in them, and that the other acts contain whole passages adapted. Phèdre has returned again to Mlle. Duchesnois; and to my mind that is the truest reading of Racine's Phèdre.

LIONEL TENNYSON.

PURCHASE IN THE CHURCH.

SIR JOHN ELIOT, the purest patriot of a generation not wanting in patriots, when he desired to be made a colonel and a deputy-lieutenant of his county, tried to smooth the way by sending 20l. to 40l. in money to be distributed amongst the subordinates of the Lord Chamberlain's office. No thought that he was doing anything wrong seems to have crossed his mind. A century later, the members of Parliament who, when they dined with their political chief, expected to find a bank-note in each napkin, though hardened to it, were more conscious of their dishonour. In our own time it may be hoped that the grosser form of bribery, the payment of a sum of money for advancement to a public office, has become impossible. And as with public men, so it is with that large class of unpaid trustees on whom so much in English life depends, and to whom the protection of so many interests, and the care of so much property, public and private, are committed. Malversation is almost unheard of.

Almost, but, alas! not quite. With one class of trustees alone, by a strange and inexplicable anomaly, the very reverse of improvement has been going on, and the public conscience has been growing, not more sensitive, but more and more callous. Patrons of Church preferment alone have been gradually permitted by the law, by public opinion, and by the acquiescence of the clergy, to convert what was in its essence (if not in form) simply a trust, into a means of raising money for themselves. The trustee of a charity or of a marriage settlement, or the guardian of a minor, would be disgraced for life if he were detected in taking money to influence him in the exercise of his trust. Patrons of Church livings daily advertise the next presentations to them in the newspapers, with only just sufficient sense of shame to make them conceal their names. A system has grown up, partly legal and partly illegal, by which, in plain language, patrons are enabled to plunder the clergy for their own benefit.

In tracing this fatal change, it is not necessary to stop to define the word Simony, or to consider whether an Act of Parliament can or cannot alter the meaning of the word, and make the act usually expressed by it morally right or wrong. Simony in any sense, such a state of things as is legal now, would not have been tolerated for a

moment in the Church, with all its faults, of Queen Elizabeth's time. The story of Tetzel and his indulgences was then too recent for that, the notion of any spiritual privilege or office being saleable for filthy lucre too abhorrent to the very idea of Protestantism. There had been no concealment, no euphemism, no mistake about Tetzel's purchasesystem. It had been thrust insolently, defiantly, upon the world. So bald das Geld im Kasten klingt,

So bald die Seel' 'gen Himmel springt,

had been written in plain German on his money-boxes. It was the crowning iniquity, the spark which had set Europe in a flame; and Protestant England, once free, was not likely, for some time to come at least, to tolerate the cloven hoof in any shape.

And so in 1547, albeit a time when a good deal of Church property was changing hands not always in creditable fashion to those concerned, it was enacted by the Injunctions that:

To avoid the detestable sin of simony, because buying and selling of benefices is execrable before God, therefore all such persons as buy any benefices, or come to them by fraud and deceit, shall be deprived thereof and made incapable at any time after to receive any spiritual preferment, and such as sell them, or by any colour bestow them for their own gain and profit, shall lose their right and title to the patronage.1

This was confirmed verbatim by Elizabeth in 1559.

By Canon 40 of 1603:

To avoid the detestable sin of simony, because buying and selling of spiritual and ecclesiastical functions, offices, promotions, dignities, and livings is execrable before God, therefore .

any one entering upon any spiritual cure was to take the following oath:

I, N. N., do swear that I have made no simoniacal payment, contract, or promise, directly or indirectly by myself, or by any other to my knowledge or with my consent, to any person or persons whatsoever, for or concerning the procuring and obtaining of this ecclesiastical dignity, place, preferment, office, or living. ...

an oath exacted up to our own time, and, with a slight modification (to be noticed later), exacted still.

It would seem that by the early part of the next century evasions of the law had begun to be practised, for in the last year of Queen Anne a statute was passed to prevent persons in orders from buying next presentations, directly or indirectly, any such contract being declared to be simoniacal. This act did not declare the bona fide purchase by laymen of next presentations to be illegal; but that the legality of such sales was doubtful, or at least that they were not often practised, may be inferred from the fact that until early in the present century it was generally considered that a sale of a next

1 Phillimore's Ecclesiastical Law, p. 1107.