it clear from the first hour of Signor Mario’s stage life that a course of no common order of fascination had begun.”  Mario sung after this each season in London and Paris for several years, without its falling to his lot to create any new important stage characters.  When Donizetti produced “Don Pasquale” at the Theatre Italiens in 1843, Mario had the slight part of the lover.  The reception at rehearsal was ominous, and, in spite of the beauty of the music, everybody prophesied a failure.  The two directors trembled with dread of a financial disaster.  The composer shrugged his shoulders, and taking the arm of his friend, M. Dermoy, the music publisher, left the theatre.  “They know nothing about the matter,” he laughingly said; “I know what ‘Don Pasquale’ needs.  Come with me.”  On reaching his library at home, Donizetti unearthed from a pile of dusty manuscript tumbled under the piano what appeared to be a song.  “Take that,” he said to his friend, “to Mario at once that he may learn it without delay.”  This song was the far-famed “Com e gentil.”  The serenade was sung with a tambourine accompaniment played by Lablache himself, concealed from the audience.  The opera was a great success, no little of which was due to the neglected song which Donizetti had almost forgotten.

It was not till 1846 that Mario took the really exalted place by which he is remembered in his art, and which even the decadence of his vocal powers did not for a long time deprive him of.  He never lost something amateurish, but this gave him a certain distinction and fine breeding of style, as of a gentleman who deigned to practice an art as a delightful accomplishment.  Personal charm and grace, borne out by a voice of honeyed sweetness, fascinated the stern as well as the sentimental critic into forgetting all his deficiencies, and no one was disposed to reckon sharply with one so genially endowed with so much of the nobleman in bearing, so much of the poet and painter in composition.  To those who for the first time saw Mario play such parts as Almaviva, Gennaro, and Raoul, it was a new revelation, full of poetic feeling and sentiment.  Here his unique supremacy was manifest.  He will live in the world’s memory as the best opera lover ever seen, one who out of the insipidities and fustian of the average lyric drama could conjure up a conception steeped in the richest colors of youth, passion, and tenderness, and strengthened by the atmosphere of stage verity.  In such scenes as the fourth act of “Les Huguenots” and the last act of the “Favorita” Signor Mario’s singing and acting were never to be forgotten by those that witnessed them.  Intense passion and highly finished vocal delicacy combined to make these pictures of melodious suffering indelible.