vocal powers in the drawing-room, at the imminent risk of being turned out of the house at a minute's warning by their justly infuriated "missus." No modern play-wright seems to have the slightest notion that there is a time proper for singing, and a time proper for holding one's tongue. Shakspeare introduced songs, and why shouldn't they? True; but Shakspeare never went a single inch out of his way to accommodate a song. His men and women sing exactly as men and women ought to sing—at the proper time, and in the proper manner; two requisites which we, who sing away, "ab ovo usque ad mala," have most unaccountably lost sight of. I quote the following words from the very last number of Maga, without curtailment, partly for the excellence of the criticism, and partly because they supplied the hint for these, my present rude lucubrations:—"Joanna Baillie," says the critic, for he is speaking of no less a name, "takes care to make no people sing in situations in which it is not natural for them to do so; the songs are all sung by those who have little or nothing to act,—[so Amicus, in As you Like It,]—and introduced when nothing very interesting is going on; and they are supposed not to be spontaneous expressions of sentiment in the singer, but, as songs in ordinary life usually are, compositions of other people, which have been often sung before, and which are only generally applicable to the present occasion. In these few words, which are nearly all her own, this great poetess has laid down the principles on which alone can any musical drama be constructed agreeably to nature."
So much for theatrical song-singing; though, by the way, I have yet another crow to pick with it before I leave it, inasmuch as the better the song is sung, the more it tends, by producing an encore, to dispel still further the already fading illusion of the stage. The grand object of the drama is, of course, to "hold the mirror up to nature," that it may admire (which it may do without vanity) its own beauties, and see and amend its own follies and deformities. Foremost among its secondary aims, I take to be the endeavour to impress the spectator with a belief, as far as such a thing is possible, that the scenes which pass before his eyes are not fictions but realities—to make him give himself up to the illusion of the moment, annihilating both time and space from the instant the curtain rises—transporting himself through centuries, and across oceans—undergoing a living metempsychosis—now a "royal Dane," and now an "antique Roman,"—and subsiding into his pristine John Bullism only when some second-rate son of the buskin glides delicately from behind the curtain, to announce the entertainments of the morrow. I do not know whether or no my principle be correct; but, be this as it may, it is that upon which I like to act myself, if the gods would only allow me. But no—the powers of the one-shilling gallery are a straightforward, matter-of-fact race of deities, that have no notion of being deluded in any way whatever: tailor outsqueaks tailor, barber out-bravos barber, baker outclaps baker, butcher outwhistles butcher—the play stands still—the actors return to their old attitudes—the song is sung again; and Miss Snevellicci, act as she will, is, for the rest of the evening, Miss Snevellicci, and Miss Snevellicci only. I never yet saw Richard dream or die a second time; but, should it ever be the pleasure of the British public to demand such an effort (and there are many things, as far as I see, more improbable), I could regard the exhibition with exactly the same degree of complacency. But I am running away from my friend the mayoress.
I suppose a lady of fashion now-a-days would as soon think of admitting that she did not adore Italian music, as she would of confessing her age. For my part, I look upon our Italianizing dames pretty much as sturdy old Juvenal looked upon the Græcizing patricians—"non possum ferre, Quirites, Græcam urbem." There is no end to our unnatural adoptions—"Jampridem Syrus in Tiberim defluxit Orontes"—Italians, and French, and Germans—the Swiss family This, and the Dutch family That, and the Russian family T'other—Chanteurs Montagnards, Siffleurs, and Chin-choppers—Alpine minstrels, and Bohemian minstrels, and minstrels from the Lord knows where; verily, the plague of foreigners is upon us, and of all live plagues defend me from this! Were the evil confined to the boards of the Opera-House, or the purlieus of
