LIGHT-HAIRED YOUNG MAN.—­“But, my dear, it seems to me that your best society must consist chiefly of Jews—­judging from the names you mention.”

YOUNG LADY.—­“Well, what if it does?  They are rich, are they not?  What more could you want?”

LIGHT-HAIRED YOUNG MAN.—­“What, indeed!  But the music is just as good as it would be if the fashionable Israelites were here,—­isn’t it?”

SHE.—­“The music as good!  Why, Charles, everybody knows that the Italian opera music is perfectly lovely.  This is only English, you know.”

HE.—­“It is precisely the same.  Here the Somnmabula is sung with English instead of Italian words.  That doesn’t alter a single note.”

SHE.—­“You are too ridiculous!  The idea of attempting to make me believe that this is just like the Italian Opera!  Don’t you suppose I knows anything about music?”

OLD GENTLEMAN.—­“I heard CAROLINE RICHINGS sing in 1808,—­I think it was.  I tell you she sings better now tan she did then, but the stupid public never appreciated her.  I recollect saying to KEAN—­not CHARLES, you know, but the KEAN—­that I knew a young lady that would be a splendid singer some of these days—­meaning CAROLINE, of course.  ‘Well, sir,’ says KEAN, ‘what of it; you can’t drink her, can you?’ Gad! he was the best man for repartee I ever knew.  To give you an instance; one night KEAN and I, and old SMITH,—­you don’t remember old SMITH, I presume; he played old men at the Boston Theatre sixty years ago; I never met a jollier fellow,—­I remember his saying one night when JUNICS BOOTH was playing—­let me see, what was the play; it wasn’t the Apostate, I hardly think, for—­”

Here the orchestra mercifully strikes up, and the big drum drums the garrulous monologue of the veteran theatrical observer.  We have another act of the opera, sung far better than any opera has been sung at the Academy for years.  Pretty ROSE HERSEE—­when have we had a voice as pure, or a manner as charming as hers?—­sings in this act, and her tones so closely resemble those of NILSSON in their exquisite purity, that we wonder how she has escaped the abuse of that “independent critical journal,” the Season, until we notice a middle-aged gentleman sleeping quietly with a copy of the Season on his lap, and remember that at NIBLO’S GARDEN the proprietor of the independent critical journal is permitted to distribute his mental soothing syrup, while at STEINWAY HALL a rival sheet is the only admitted programme.

And I say—­still thinking of NILSSON—­to an experienced theatre-goer,—­“Why does WATSON abuse NILSSON?”

And he answers, with the contemptuous, but obviously honest inquiry—­“Who’s WATSON?”

Really appalled by the suggestion that there exists a man with soul and things so completely dead as not to have heard of the great WATSON, I change my question and ask him:  “Why does the Season abuse NILSSON?”