François Joseph, a distinguished French tragedian, was born at Paris on the 15th of January 1763, but spent the first nine years of his life in London, where his father exercised the profession of a dentist. Having returned to Paris in 1772, he began his studies and gave signs of great intelligence and of a rare talent for scenic display. Having again returned to London, he appeared in an amateur company of French players and attracted considerable notice by the depth and power of his delineations of the various characters assigned to him. He was urged by some persons of distinction to appear in the theatre of Drury Lane, but Talma, who had probably an instinctive consciousness of the career of honour which awaited him in Paris, returned to that city, and, after assisting his father for eighteen months, he appeared in the character of Séide in Voltaire's Mahomet, in 1783. According to his confidants, who were duly collected on the occasion, he would never make an actor. There was a total want of le feu sacré for the youthful Parisian taste. Talma, who knew what he still wanted, although his audience mistook restraint for coldness, took as kindly as a youth with a strong central fire burning in him and raging for egress is likely to take a hostile criticism, and retired to the peaceful pursuit of his profession, to the study of history and the antiquities of the stage. On the 21st of November 1787, he reappeared as Charles IX. at the Theatre Français and took his audience by storm. He had now got complete master of himself; and his life henceforward was a series of ovations. He reformed the costume of the French stage by introducing into each play the appropriate dress of the time in which the scene of the piece was laid. This reform had been vainly attempted by M. Lekain, by Mdle. Clairet, and by Mdle. Saint-Huberti. Talma is said to have created some seventy-one characters. Among the most popular of those delineations were his Orestes, Edipus, Nero, Manlius, Caesar, Cinna, Augustus, Coriolanus, Hector, Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, Leicester, Sulla, Regulus, Danville, Leonidas, Charles VI., and Henry VIII. He broke up the jingling regularity of French rhyme into something like impassioned prose, in the steady yet careful vehemence of his delivery. He appeared on the stage for the last time on the 11th of June 1826, and he died on the 19th of October of the same year. He is said to have been about the middle height, square built, with a most plastic countenance, which, with the tones of his voice, was capable of expressing the fiercest passion and the tenderest sympathy. In his manners he was eminently kind, manly, and frank. He spoke English well, and admired both England and her institutions. He was a friend of the great actor, John Kemble.