seemed exaggerated and out of place.  In the scenes with Iago he equaled Salvini, yet did not in any one point surpass him.  Nor did he in any way imitate him.  The fury of the two Othellos is widely different.  Salvini is the fiercer, for Rossi’s rage has a background of intensest suffering.  One is an enraged tiger, the other a wounded lion.  Both are maddened—­the one with wrath, the other with pain.  But in the last act, with the unutterable anguish of its closing scenes—­the swift remorse, the unavailing agony of that noble nature, too late undeceived, the wild, pathetic tenderness wherewith Othello clasped the dead Desdemona to his heart, smoothing back her loosened tresses with an inarticulate cry of almost superhuman love and woe—­the horror of the catastrophe was all swallowed up in a sympathy whose pain was wellnigh too great to be aroused by mimic despair.  The fall of the curtain was greeted with a tempest of applause.  Men sprang to their feet and wildly waved their hats in the air.  Shouts of “Bravo, Rossi!” and “Vive Rossi!” arose on all sides.  Ladies stood up in the boxes waving their handkerchiefs, and every hand and throat joined in the universal uproar.  Before noon the next day every seat in the house was engaged for the second representation.  The great actors of the French stage came to study the acting of this new genius who had so suddenly made his appearance in their midst.  To this sudden success succeeded the announcement of a prolonged engagement, the failing health of the younger Rossi having decided his father to relinquish all immediate idea of an American tour.

The second character that Rossi assumed was Hamlet, and in this he achieved the greatest success of his Parisian engagement.  The opera of Thomas had rendered the public familiar with the personage of the hero, and the magnates of the Grand Opera came to the Salle Ventadour to study this new and forcible presentment of the baritone prince, who wails and warbles through the operatic travesty of Shakespeare’s masterpiece.  That the impersonation will prove wholly acceptable to all Shakespearian critics in England or America is extremely doubtful.  For the Hamlet of Rossi is mad—­undeniably, unmistakably mad—­from the moment of his interview with the Ghost.  But once accept that view, and the characterization stands unrivaled upon our modern stage.  Nothing can be imagined at once more powerful or more pathetic than that picture of a “noble mind o’erthrown,” alternating between crushed, hopeless misery and wild excitement—­thirsting for the rest and peace that only death can bestow, yet shrinking from the fearful leap into the dim unknown beyond the grave.  The scene with the Queen is inimitably grand.  One feels that the entrance of the Ghost comes only in time to stay the frenzied hand, and then follows the swift revulsion when Hamlet, melting into tenderest pathos, kneels at his mother’s feet to beseech her to repent—­a mood that changes anew to frenzy when his wild wandering thoughts