the name by which a celebrated French tragedienne is ordinarily known, was the daughter of Abraham Felix and Esther Haya, both of Jewish race, and was born in a wretched little inn in Munf, in the canton of Aran in Switzerland, on the 24th of March 1632. Her father was a poor pedlar, who pursued his craft by the highways till he succeeded in housing his numerous progeny in Lyons, where her mother opened a paltry little second-hand clothes shop. Sarah, the eldest child, sang from café to café, and Rachel collected the coppers. Towards 1830 the family removed to Paris, and continued the life they had led in Lyons. Shortly afterwards, Rachel seems to have found interest to recommend her to St Amurie, manager of an institution where pupils were taught declamation gratuitously; and in 1837 this meagre, dark, poverty-stricken little girl, with her harsh gruff voice, found an engagement with M. Poisson at 3000 francs for three years. On the 12th of June 1838 she made her first appearance on the classic boards of the Théâtre Français, where she was destined to earn her greatest fame. From this date her progress was upwards and onwards. The grand old formal drama of Corneille and Racine, so long believed to be dead, revived again at the splendid declamation and singular attitudinizing of this new tragic muse. She was the organ of the great classic poets; and, accustomed to the pomp and grandeur of the sounding Alexandrine, her clear, distinct enunciation brought out every beauty in bold relief; but unfortunately it did the same with every fault. She had not the power of concealing under the warmth of delivery the meagreness of the author's style, and M. Samson could not teach her that. Her best characters were probably "Phèdre," "Roxane," "Camille," "Lyceiska," and "Lady Tartuffe." When the old drama began to pall at the Théâtre Français, modern characters were created for her, in which, however, she very rarely succeeded. The managers gave her an enormous salary, yet this did not content her; she was almost constant in her quarrels with them. She dictated her own terms, and kept the authors whom she lured to write for her in a perfect fever. In her acting she was terrible rather than touching, and she was often far from being true. Her tears had the bitterness of Marah in them, and very rarely excited tears in her audience. She never melted or awakened sympathy; but she always inspired the spectator with wonder and fear. The love of gold was born with her, and swam in her Jewish blood. Her graspingness had one redeeming feature, and that was, that she permitted her family to share in her gains. She had few real friends, and those she had were new. She was a woman of real genius, but that genius, though of a very high order, was very limited in its range. During her congés she visited professionally London, St Petersburg, Amsterdam, Germany, Rome, and the French provinces, and finally made a tour to America, which so aggravated the disease under which she was labouring that on her return she sought the shores of the Mediterranean, and died at Canuet on January 4, 1858. Her disease was consumption. Rachel was never married, yet she left behind her two sons, who were old enough to know their loss. (Memoirs of Rachel, by Madame de B——, 2 vols., were published in London in 1858.)