heads, princes, nobles, and savans on the Continent,* and from a great number of persons of rank and literary and scientific eminence in England, of which, besides performing 150 times in London, he visited most of the great towns, all bearing witness to his astonishing powers, and most of them commending his manners and qualifications as a gentleman. He brought letters to many individuals in Edinburgh; one of which was the means of our introduction to him, which has been to us so satisfactory. M. Alexandre's first exhibition was announced to take place in the Caledonian Theatre, to which we went, and watched, as narrowly as we could, every thing he did or said, as he succeeded, by his own unassisted exertions, in engrossing and highly diverting a crowded audience for three hours.†

We shall now endeavour to describe what we saw, as minutely as we observed it narrowly. He performed a sort of drama, the hero of which is a clever young rogue, in the service of an old physic-taking valetudinarian and his careful fantastical wife, upon whom he perpetrates all sorts of mischievous tricks, both in revenge of his own short commons, and in furtherance of a scheme, for which he is well paid, to unite the only daughter to a very agreeable young officer of infantry, quartered in the neighbourhood. Without merit as a comedy, the incidents of this piece, some of them very ludicrous, afforded him the means of exhibiting every variety of his vocal illusion. He represents the whole characters, male and female, young and old, himself, displays address and quickness which we never saw exceeded, changes his dress thirty or forty times, with a rapidity which appears almost preternatural, and produces deception so perfect, that the whole dramatis

The kings of Prussia, Bavaria, and Saxony, Princes Blucher, Swartzenberg, Metternich, Wrede, M. Goethe, Blumenbach, &c. It is a curious fact, that the aged Landgravine of Hesse Darmstadt was enabled, by having seen M. Saint Gille in Paris, to compare his powers with M. Alexandre's, to which last she gave a decided preference.

+M. Alexandre's success and popularity in Edinburgh, he himself says, has not been exceeded any where. Besides commanding overflowing houses, he has visited many of the most respectable inhabitants, and made the most favourable impression on all who have conversed with him, by his agreeable appearance, engaging manners, and liberal sentiments.

persona seem to be bustling and talking at the same moment.*

His change of dress is not, however, more complete than his change of manner, voice, and whole character. He spoke with his own natural voice in the valet ; a deep strong voice in the old man; a whining and chattering, and most affected voice in the lady; in a degagé easy style in the dandy officer; and with the softest tripping femininism in the dandy's beloved. Of all these he maintained the character with such judgment and effect, as to convince us of one truth, which our readers are requested to mark, that his histrionic powers, his talents as an actor, are very considerable.

As it is of great moment for our phrenological tests in the sequel, to keep steadily in view the power of imitation, we may here mention a sort of interlude, which M. Alexandre performed, in which he manifested his possession of that talent, with the farther power of concealing self, to a degree of intensity which, till that moment, we could not have believed possible. He exhibited the visages, voices, and manners of different nuns of a convent, where he is supposed to have served outside the grate. He is first a very pretty noviciate endeavouring to sing, but covered with bashfulness and heigh-hos!

"Her pretty oath by yea and nay,

She could not, must not, durst not play."

In an instant he is the angry abbess chiding her foolish pupil, with a face as round, as flat, and as pitted, as a split muffin, and a voice to suit. Anon he rises, like a ghost from the ground, as Sister Beatrice, with a face double the length of the average of the human countenance. Down

* M. Alexandre told us, that his attendants who attire him behind the scenes, often urge him to wait a reasonable time to prevent doubts of his identity. He paid an unconscious compliment to the unsuspicious British character, when he added, that although on some occasions, on the Continent, he has found it necessary to station a responsible public officer on the stage, to vouch for him, he has been delighted with the absence of all suspicion, of which the cordial manner of his British spectators has given him the most encouraging assurances. Some of the changes are almost incredible; the old lady's long train has scarcely disappeared on one side of the stage, when the slim jacketed domestic enters on the other, with a frying-pan in his hand to make an omelet for his master.

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he sits again, and shows, just above the level of the table, a face as preternaturally broad as the other was long, the said face being the index to the soul of Sister Agnes. A visage reduced to the size of a man's fist now peeps from the hood of sister Angelina. The next face is all gone off to the east, and its successor to the west, till he concludes with Sister Celestine's lamentable paralytic deformity, an exhibition greatly too like reality not to be exquisitely painful to the spectators, and which, we have heard many say, M. Alexandre would gain credit for good taste as well as good feeling by omitting altogether. His other personations, amounting to an absolute change of identity before our eyes, are quite sufficient to establish him the most wonderful personator that ever exhibited.*

M. Alexandre's vocal exhibition consisted of two very obviously distinguishable parts: First, His mere imitations or changes of voice to suit the different characters in which he appeared on the stage; in which he meant no farther illusion, and left the audience to take the personage in their sight for the speaker. In this it is obvious there was comic imitation, but none of the illusion more strictly called ventriloquism. To this class belong his imitations of animals and inanimate things, as a plane, a screw, a saw, an omelet frying, &c. Secondly, His ventriloquial efforts. In these he produced the effect of persons speaking from a distance; from the other side of a door, both shut and open; from a trunk, also alternately open and shut; from a chimney-top; and from a cellar; with gradation of the voice as the person in the chimney and cellar ascended or descended. With his ventriloquial exertions alone we have to do here; and in these the illusion of confinement, free

*M. Alexandre paid a visit to the late Sir Walter Scott, to deliver a letter of introduction. This was put into Sir Walter's hands by a young man of very interesting and genteel appearance, and with the greatest modesty. He read it, and when he looked up to reply, a being stood before him as different in identity from what he had last looked upon, as an old grim French quack-doctor may be supposed to be from the first personage we have described. Sir Walter started, and, with an exclamation of wonder, asked if he could possibly be the same person who had two minutes before delivered him the letter! Our accomplished friend, Mr Joseph, succeeded admirably with two busts of M. Alexandre, one in each of these dissimilar characters, and thus fixed down a real instead of an evanescent proof of the power of personation, which is especially valuable to phrenology.

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dom, distance, and gradual approach and recession, was complete. In M. Alexandre's production of these curious effects we observed several particulars:

1. His voice, to give the illusion of distance or confinement, was invariably a stifled voice; and in changing from confinement to freedom, he dropt ventriloquism, and spoke merely in character, as first above distinguished.

2. He never began to speak en ventriloque without previously establishing a point, place, or local, or at least direction from, or in which the audience should believe the voice to come. This he did in course of the incidents of the piece, so that all impression of arrangement was prevented, and the audience never dreamed of disputing the direction with the performer, but took all that for granted, to his most perfect satisfaction. He aided the illusion by his own action and attitude, as he spoke into a cellar, up a chimney, into a trunk or press, or through a door.

3. We never saw his face, at least his front face, when speaking en ventriloque; but we observed it always turned towards us when he spoke as the person in our sight.

4. We observed, that after his ventriloquial exertions he often coughed; and, lastly, he counterfeited inimitably the hoarseness of a severe cold.

On returning from this singular exhibition our own conjectures on the subject of ventriloquism were these:1. That by the force of uncommonly acute powers of perception, which nothing that happens around him escapes, whether visible, tangible, or audible (phrenologicè a large endowment of all the knowing organs, particularly Tune and Individuality), he has become perfect master of sounds in all their varieties and modifications. In this per se he may have, and no doubt has, multitudes of rivals. 2. Having got familiar with the intensities of sounds as they alight upon the human ear, from various distances and certain places, he does nothing more than imitate the sound desired, not as it is where uttered, but where heard. It is in either case an imitable sound. It would seem to follow, that the closer the person to be deceived is to the ventriloquist, the illusion must be the more complete, seeing that the sound imitated is the sound that strikes the performer's own ear, which, it is obvious, may not suit the variously arranged spectators in a large theatre. 3. As

the sound which reaches our ears must necessarily vary with the distance it has come, but as each variation is a specific imitable sound, so the ventriloquist has only-assuredly it requires exquisite skill-to vary his imitation progressively, in either direction, to give the perfect illusion of advance and retreat. An analogy occurred to us, in which, if, as yet unknown to ourselves, we have ever been anticipated, we should only have the more confidence. Distance is artificially represented to the eye on the landscape-painter's canvass by gradual diminution, according to the rules of mathematical perspective, of the size of the successive objects; and, according to those of aërial perspective, of the strength of their colouring; from the large and bold foreground, to the diminished distance, almost blending with the tints of the sky. Now, M. Alexandre's vocal illusions are, as it were, the perspective of sounds, and address to the ear a gradation which we cannot help associating with the successive distances of the landscape whence they come. What an extent of country a hunting party may be made to traverse, in imagination, in the theatre, by a skilful graduation of the sounds of their bugles, from the faint sound in the distant hills, till the boisterous Nimrods -their tunics of scarlet-are smacking their whips on the stage. As to the direction of the sound, we conjectured this to be exclusively the doing of the imaginations of the audience, when a locality was established. This we put to the test: believing that the performer could do no more than imitate distance, without the possibility of imitating direction, which has no distinctive sound as such; we tried to reverse, in our own minds, the direction of the chimneytop and the cellar, and we found the identity of the sound suit either place. It is obvious that, when a ventriloquist fairly alarms people, he may give any direction he pleases to his voice.

That this perspective of sound is the essence of the effect produced we could not doubt; of the physiology of the inquiry the physical power by which the effect is produced we were by no means so certain. Organs of speech in the stomach or belly we at once discarded as a barbarous absurdity; but we really saw nothing in the imitations which might not be executed by a person who possessed a