most critical moment.  However, her stage-fright seems to have disappeared, and we find her playing Silvio Pellico’s Francesco, da Rimini at fifteen, and at eighteen making her debut as Marie Stuart.  At this time the naturalism of the French method was gradually displacing the artificial elocution and academic poses of the Italian school of acting.  Madame Ristori seems to have tried to combine simplicity with style, and the passion of nature with the self-restraint of the artist.  ‘J’ai voulu fondre les deux manieres,’ she tells us, ’car je sentais que toutes choses etant susceptibles de progres, l’art dramatique aussi etait appele a subir des transformations.’  The natural development, however, of the Italian drama was almost arrested by the ridiculous censorship of plays then existing in each town under Austrian or Papal rule.  The slightest allusion to the sentiment of nationality or the spirit of freedom was prohibited.  Even the word patria was regarded as treasonable, and Madame Ristori tells us an amusing story of the indignation of a censor who was asked to license a play, in which a dumb man returns home after an absence of many years, and on his entrance upon the stage makes gestures expressive of his joy in seeing his native land once more.  ‘Gestures of this kind,’ said the censor, ’are obviously of a very revolutionary tendency, and cannot possibly be allowed.  The only gestures that I could think of permitting would be gestures expressive of a dumb man’s delight in scenery generally.’

The stage directions were accordingly altered, and the word ‘landscape’ substituted for ‘native land’!  Another censor was extremely severe on an unfortunate poet who had used the expression ‘the beautiful Italian sky,’ and explained to him that ‘the beautiful Lombardo-Venetian sky’ was the proper official expression to use.  Poor Gregory in Romeo and Juliet had to be rechristened, because Gregory is a name dear to the Popes; and the

   Here I have a pilot’s thumb,
   Wrecked as homeward he did come,

of the first witch in Macbeth was ruthlessly struck out as containing an obvious allusion to the steersman of St. Peter’s bark.  Finally, bored and bothered by the political and theological Dogberrys of the day, with their inane prejudices, their solemn stupidity, and their entire ignorance of the conditions necessary for the growth of sane and healthy art, Madame Ristori made up her mind to leave the stage.  She, however, was extremely anxious to appear once before a Parisian audience, Paris being at that time the centre of dramatic activity, and after some consideration left Italy for France in the year 1855.  There she seems to have been a great success, particularly in the part of Myrrha; classical without being cold, artistic without being academic, she brought to the interpretation of the character of Alfieri’s great heroine the colour-element of passion, the form-element of style.  Jules Janin was loud in