speech of Phedre to Oenone wherein she reveals her passion for Hippolyte and pourtrays the terrible struggle between duty and female delicacy on the one hand, and on the other a flame that could not be overcome, convinced as it were of the complete inutility of further efforts of resistance and invoking death as her only refuge.  I was moved even to tears.  I am so great an admirer of the whole of this speech beginning “Mon mal vient de plus lorn” etc., and ending “Un reste de chaleur tout pret a s’exhaler,” that I think in it Racine has not only united the excellencies of Euripides, Sappho and Theocritus in describing the passion of love, but has far surpassed them all; that speech is certainly the masterpiece of French versification and scarcely inferior to it is that beautiful and ingenuous confession of love by Hippolyte to Aricie.  What an admirable pendant to the love of Phedre!  In Hippolyte you behold the innocence, simplicity and ingenuousness of a first and pure attachment:  in Phedre the embrasement, the ungovernable delirium of a criminal passion.

I have seen Mlle Duchesnois again in the Merope of Voltaire and admire her more and more.  This is an admirable play.  The dialogue is so spirited; the agitation of maternal tenderness, and the occasional bursts of feelings impossible to be restrained, render this play one of the most interesting perhaps on the French stage, and Mlle Duchesnois gave with the happiest effect her part in those two scenes; the first wherein she supposes Egisthe to be the person who has killed her son; in the other where having discovered the reality of his person, she is obliged to dissemble the discovery, but on Egisthe being about to be sacrificed she exclaims “Barbare, c’est mon fils!” The part of Egisthe was given by a young actor who made his appearance at this theatre for the first tune, and he executed his part with complete success (Firmin, I think, was his name).  Lafond did the part of Polyphonte and did it well.  At this tragedy many allusions were caught hold of by the audience according as they were Bourbonically or Napoleonically inclined; at that part of Polyphonte’s speech wherein he says: 

  Le premier qui fut Roi fut un soldat heureux. 
  Qui sert bien son pays n’a pas besoin d’ayeux.

Thunders of applause proceeded from those who applied it to Napoleon.  At the line: 

  Est il d’autre parti que celui de nos rois?

a loud shout and clapping proceeded from the Royalists; but I fancy if hands had been shown these last would have been in a sad minority.  I have often amused myself with comparing the Merope of Voltaire with that of Maffei and am puzzled to which to give the preference.  Maffei has made Polyphonte a more odious and perhaps on that account a more theatrical character, while Voltaire’s Polyphonte is more in real life.  In the play of Voltaire he is a rough brutal soldier, void of delicacy of feeling and