object with another ends in a double disappointment. Such is the best What makes the difference between an opera of Mozart's and the singing of a thrush confined in a wooden cage at the corner of the street? The one is nature, and the other is art: the one is paid for, and the other is not. Madame Fodor sang the air of Vedrai Carino in Don Giovanni,' so divinely, because she was hired to sing it; she sang it to please the audience, not herself, and did not always like to be encored in it; but the thrush that awakes at daybreak with its song, does not sing because it is paid to sing, or to please others, or to be admired or criticised. It sings because it is happy: it pours the thrilling sounds from its throat, to relieve the overflowings of its own heart-the liquid notes come from, and go to the heart, dropping balm into it, as the gushing spring revives the traveler's parched and fainting lips. That stream of joy comes pure and fresh to the longing sense, free from art and affectation; the same that rises over vernal groves, mingled with the breath of morning, and the perfumes of the wild hyacinth; it waits for no audience, it wants no rehearsing, and still, "Hymns its good God, and carols sweet of love." This is the great difference between nature and art, that the one is what the other seems, and gives all the pleasure it expresses, because it feels it itself. Madam Fodor sang, as a musical instrument may be made to play a tune, and perhaps with no more real delight: but it is not so with the linnet or the thrush, that sings because God pleases and pours out its little soul in pleasure. This is the reason why its singing is (so far) so much better than melody or harmony, than bass or treble, than the Italian or the German school, than quavers or crotchets, or half-notes, or canzonets, or quartetts, or any thing in the world but truth and nature! The Opera is the most artificial of all things. It is not only art, but ostentatious, unambiguous, exclusive art. It does not subsist as an imitation of nature, but in contempt of it; and instead of seconding, its object is to pervert and sophisticate all our natural impressions of things. When the Opera first made its appearance in this country, there were strong prejudices entertained against it, and it was ridiculed as a species of the mockheroic. The prejudices have worn out with time, and the ridicule has ceased; but the grounds for both remain the same in the nature of the thing itself. At the theatre, we see and hear what has been said, thought and done by various people elsewhere: at the Opera, we see and hear what was never said, thought, or done any where but at the Opera. Not only is all communication with nature cut off, but every appeal to the imagination is sheathed and softened in the melting medium of Siren sounds. と The ear is cloyed and glutted with warbled ecstasies or agonies; while every avenue to terror or pity is carefully stopped up and guarded by song and recitative. Music is not made the vehicle of poetry, but poetry of music; the very meaning of the words is lost or refined away in the effeminacy of a foreign language. A grand serious Opera is a tragedy wrapped up in soothing airs, to suit the tender feelings of the nurslings of fortunewhere tortured victims swoon on beds of roses, and the pangs of despair sink in tremulous accents into downy repose. Just so much of human misery is given as to lull those who are exempted from it into a deeper sense of their own security: just enough of the picture of human life is shown to relieve their langor, without disturbing their indifference ;-not to excite their sympathy, but "with some sweet oblivious antidote," to pamper their sleek and sordid apathy. In a word, the whole business of the Opera is to stifle emotion in its birth, and to intercept every feeling in its progress to the heart. Every impression that, left to itself, might sink deep into the mind, and wake it to real sympathy, is overtaken and baffled by means of some other impression, plays round the surface of the imagination, trembles into airy sound, or expires in an empty pageant. In the grand carnival of the senses the pulse of life is suspended, the link which binds us to humanity is broken; the soul is fretted by the sense of excessive softness into a feverish hectic dream; truth becomes a fable; good and evil matters of perfect indifference, except as they can be made subservient to our selfish gratification; and there is hardly a vice for which the mind on coming out of the Opera is not prepared, no virtue of which it is capable! But what shall I say of the company at the Opera ? Is it not grand, select, splendid, and imposing? Do we not see there "the flower of Britain's warriors, her statesmen, and her fair," her nobles and her diplomatic characters? First, one only knows the diplomatic characters by their taking prodigious quantities of snuff, and as to the great warriors, some that I know had better not show their faces-if there is any truth in physiognomy; and as to great men, I know of but one in modern times, and neither Europe nor the Opera-house was big enough to hold him. respect to Lords and Ladies, we see them as we do gilded butterflies in glass cases. We soon get tired of them, for they seem tired of themselves and one another. They gape, stare, affect to whisper, laugh, or talk loud, to fill up the vacuities of thought and expression. They do not gratify our predilection for happy faces! But we do not feel the throb of pleasure from the blaze of beauty in the side-boxes? That blaze would be brighter, were it not quenched in the sparkling of diamonds. As for the rest, the grapes are sour. Beauty is a thing that is not made only to be seen. Who can behold it without a transient wish to be near it, to adore, to possess it? He must be a fool or a coxcomb, whom the sight of a beauty dazzles, but does not warm; whom a thousand glances shot from a thousand heavenly faces pierce without wounding; who can behold without a pang the bowers of Paradise opening to him by a thousand doors, and barred against him by magic spells!-Bright creatures, fairest of the fair, ye shine above our heads, bright as Ariadne's crown, fair as the dewy. star of evening: but ye are no more to us! There is no golden chain let down to us from you: we have sometimes seen you at play, or caught a glimpse of your faces passing in a coronet-coach; but-As I am grow ing romantic, I shall take a turn into the crush-room, where, following the train of the great statesmen, the warriors, and the diplomatic characters, I shall meet with a nearly equal display of external elegance and accomplishment, without the pride of sex, rank, or virtue! If the women were all Junos before, here they are all Venuses, and no less Goddesses! Those who complained of inaccessible beauty before, may here find beauty more accessible, and take their revenge on the boxes in the lobbies! ESSAY XVIII. OF PERSONS ONE WOULD WISH TO HAVE SEEN. "Come like shadows-so depart." LAMB it was, I think, who suggested this subject, as well as the defence of Guy Faux, which I urged him to execute. As, however, he would undertake neither, I suppose I must do both—a task for which he would have been much fitter, no less from the temerity than the felicity of his pen "Never so sure our rapture to create As when it touched the brink of all we hate." Compared with him I shall, I fear, make but a common-place piece of business of it; but I should be loth the idea was entirely lost, and besides I may avail myself of some hints of his in the progress of it. I am sometimes, I suspect a better reporter of the ideas of other people than expounder of my own. I pursue the one too far into paradox or mysticism; the others I am not bound to follow farther than I like, or than seems fair and reasonable. 66 On the question being started, A- said, "I suppose the two first persons you would choose to see would be the two greatest names in English literature, Sir Isaac Newton and Mr. Locke ?" In this A-, as usual, reckoned without his host. Every one burst out a laughing at the expression of Lamb's face, in which impatience was restrained by courtesy. Yes, the greatest names," he stammered out hastily, "but they were not persons-not persons.' -"Not persons?" said A-, looking wise and foolish at the same time, afraid his triumph might be premature. "That is," rejoined Lamb, "not characters you know. By Mr. Locke and Sir Isaac Newton, you mean the Essay on the Human Understanding,' and the Principia,' which we have to this day. Beyond their contents there is nothing personally interesting in the men. But what we want to see any one bodily for, is when there is something peculiar, striking in the individuals, more than we can learn from their writings, and yet are curious to know. I dare say Locke and Newton were very like Kneller's portraits of them. But who could paint Shakspeare?""Ay," retorted A-, "there it is; then I suppose you would prefer seeing him and Milton instead?”— "No," said Lamb, "neither. I have seen so much of Shakspeare on the stage and on book-stalls, in frontispieces and on mantle-pieces, that I am quite tired of the everlasting repetiton: and as to Milton's face, the impressions that have come down to us of it I do not like; it is too starched and puritanical; and I should be afraid of losing some of the manna of his poetry in the leaven of his countenance and the precisian's band and gown." "I shall guess no more," said A- "Who is it, then, you would like to see in his habit as he lived,' if you had your choice of the whole range of English literature?" Lamb then named Sir Thomas Brown and Fulke Greville, the friend of Sir Philip Sidney, as the two worthies whom he should feel the greatest pleasure to encounter on the door of his apartment in their night-gown and slippers, and to exchange friendly greeting with them. At this A- laughed outright, and conceived Lamb was jesting with him; but as no one followed his example, he thought there might be something in it, and waited for an explanation in a state of whimsical suspense. Lamb.then (as well as I can remember a conversation that passed twenty years ago-how time slips!). went on as follows. "The reason why. I pitch upon those two authors is, that their writings are riddles, and they themselves, the most mysterious of personages. They resemble the soothsayers of old, who dealt in dark hints and doubtful oracles; and I should like to ask them the meaning of what no mortal but themselves, I should suppose, can fathom. There is Dr. Johnson, I have no curiosity, no strange uncertainty about him: he and Boswell together have pretty well let me into the secret of what passed through his mind. He and other writers like him are sufficiently explicit:. my friends whose repose I should be tempted to disturb (were it in my power), are implicit, inextricable, inscrutable. "When I look at that obscure but gorgeous prose-composition the 'Urn-burial,' I seem to myself to look into a deep abyss, at the bottom of which are hid pearls and rich treasure; or it is like a stately labyrinth of doubt and withering speculation, and I would invoke the spirit of the author to lead me through it. Besides, who would not be curious to see the lineaments of a man who having himself been twice married, wished that mankind were propagated like trees! "As to Fulke Greville, he is like nothing but one of his own 'Prologues spoken by the ghost of an old king of Ormus,' a truly formidable and inviting personage: his style is apocalyptical, cabalistical, a knot worthy of such an apparition to untie; and for the unravelling a passage or two, I would stand the brunt of an encounter with so portentous a commentator!" "I am afraid in that case," said A-, "that if the mystery were once cleared up, the merit might be lost;"-and turning to me, whispered a friendly apprehension, that while, Lamb continued to admire these old crabbed authors, he would never become a popular writer. Dr. Donne was mentioned as a writer of the same period, with a very interesting countenance, whose history was singular, and whose meaning was often quite as uncomeatable, without a personal citation from the dead, as that of any of his contemporaries. The volume was produced; and while some one was expatiating on the exquisite simplicity and beauty of the portrait prefixed to the old edition, A- got hold of the poetry, and exclaiming "What have we here?" read the following: "Here lies a She-Sun and a He-Moon there, |