Countess Rossi was never entirely forgotten in her brilliant retirement.  Her story, gossips said, was intended to be shadowed forth “with a difference” in “L’Ambassadrice” of Scribe and Auber, written for Mme. Cinti Damoreau, whose voice resembled that of Sontag.  Travelers, who got glimpses of the august life wherein she lived, brought home tales of her popularity, of her beauty not faded but only mellowed by time, and of her lovely voice, which she had watched and cultivated in her titled leisure.  It can be fancied, then, what a thrill of interest and surprise ran through the London public when it was announced in 1848 that the Countess Rossi, owing to family circumstances, was about to resume her profession.  A small, luxuriantly bound book in green and gold, devoted to her former and more recent history, was put on sale in London, and circulated like wildfire.  The situation in London was peculiar.  Jenny Lind had created a furor in that city almost unparalleled in its musical history, and to announce that the “Swedish nightingale” was not the greatest singer that ever lived or ever could live, before a company of her admirers, was sufficient to invite personal assault.  Mlle. Lind had just departed for America.  It was an adventure little short of desperate for a singer to emerge from a retirement of a score of years and measure her musical and dramatic accomplishments against those of a predecessor whose tantalizing disappearance from the stage had rendered her on so many grounds more than ever the object of fanatical worship.

The political storm of 1848 had swept away the fortune of Countess Rossi, and when she announced her intention of returning to the stage, the director of Her Majesty’s Theatre was prompt to make her an offer of seventeen thousand pounds for the season.  She had not been idle or careless during the time when the Grisis, the Persianis, and the Linds were delighting the world with the magic of their art.  She had assiduously kept up the culture of her delicious voice, and stepped again before the foot-lights with all the ease, steadiness, and aplomb of one who had never suffered an interregnum in her lyric reign.  She came back to the stage under new and trying musical conditions, to an orchestra far stronger than that to which her youth had been accustomed, to a new world of operas.  The intrepidity and industry with which she met these difficulties are deserving of the greatest respect.  Not merely did she go through the entire range of her old parts, Susanna, Moslna, Desdemona, Donna Anna, etc., but she presented herself in a number of new works which did not exist at her farewell to the stage—­Bellini’s “Sonnambula,” Donizetti’s “Linda,” “La Figlia del Reggimento,” “Don Pasquale,” “Le Tre Nozze” of Alary, and Ilalevy’s “La Tempesta”; indeed, in the latter two creating the principal roles.  Her former companions had disappeared.  Malibran had been dead for thirteen years, Mme. Pisaroni had also