Salvini was grander and finer in King Saul than in any other embodiment that he presented. He seized the idea wholly, and he executed it with affluent power. He brought to the part every attribute necessary to its grandeur of form and its afflicting sympathy of spirit. His towering physique presented, with impressive accuracy, the Hebrew monarch, chosen of God, who was "lifted a head and shoulders above the people." His tremulous sensibility, his knowledge of suffering, his skill in depicting it, his great resources of voice, his vigour and fineness of action, his exceptional commingling of largeness and gentleness--all these attributes combined in that performance, to give magnificent reality to one of the most sublime conceptions in literature. By his personation of Saul Salvini added a new and an immortal figure to the stage pantheon of kings and heroes. Alfieri's tragedy of _Saul_ was written in 1782-83, when the haughty, impetuous, and passionate poet was thirty-four years old, and at the suggestion of the Countess of Albany, whom he loved. He had suffered a bereavement at the time, and he was in deep grief. The Countess tried to console him by reading the Bible, and when they came upon the narrative of Saul the idea of the tragedy was struck out between them. The work was written with vigorous impulse and the author has left, in his autobiography, the remark that none of his tragedies cost him so little labour. _Saul_ is in five acts and it contains 1567 lines--of that Italian _versi sciolti_ which inadequately corresponds to the blank verse of the English language. The scene is laid in the camp of Saul's army. Six persons are introduced, namely, Saul, Jonathan, David, Michel, Abner, and Achimelech. The time supposed to be occupied by the action--or rather, by the suffering--of the piece is a single day, the last in the king's life. Act first is devoted to explanation, conveyed in warnings to David, by Jonathan, his friend, and Michel, his wife. Act second presents the distracted monarch, who knows that God has forsaken him and that death is at hand. In a speech of terrible intensity he relates to Abner the story of the apparition of Samuel and the doom that the ghost has spoken. His children humour and soothe the broken old man, and finally succeed in softening his mind toward David--whom he at once loves, dreads, and hates, as the appointed instrument of his destruction and the successor to his crown. Act third shows David playing upon the harp before Saul, and chanting Saul's deeds in the service and defence of Israel--so that he calms the agonised delirium of the haunted king and wins his blessing; but at last a boastful word makes discord in the music's charm, and Saul is suddenly roused into a ghastly fury. Acts fourth and fifth deal with the wild caprices and maddening agonies of the frenzied father; the ever-varying phenomena of his mental disease; the onslaught of the Philistines; the killing of his sons; the frequent