were as beautiful as Houris.  Even in William IV.’s time, when I think of Duvernay prancing in as the Bayadere,—­I say it was a vision of loveliness such as mortal eyes can’t see now-a-days.  How well I remember the tune to which she used to appear!  Kaled used to say to the Sultan, “My lord, a troop of those dancing and singing gurls called Bayaderes approaches,” and, to the clash of cymbals, and the thumping of my heart, in she used to dance!  There has never been anything like it—­never.  There never will be—­I laugh to scorn old people who tell me about your Noblet, your Montessu, your Vestris, your Parisot—­pshaw, the senile twaddlers!  And the impudence of the young men, with their music and their dancers of to-day!  I tell you the women are dreary old creatures.  I tell you one air in an opera is just like another, and they send all rational creatures to sleep.  Ah, Ronzi de Begnis, thou lovely one!  Ah, Caradoni, thou smiling angel!  Ah, Malibran!  Nay, I will come to modern times, and acknowledge that Lablache was a very good singer thirty years ago (though Porto was the boy for me):  and then we had Ambrogetti, and Curioni, and Donzelli, a rising young singer.

But what is most certain and lamentable is the decay of stage beauty since the days of George IV.  Think of Sontag!  I remember her in Otello and the Donna del Lago in ’28.  I remember being behind the scenes at the opera (where numbers of us young fellows of fashion used to go), and seeing Sontag let her hair fall down over her shoulders previous to her murder by Donzelli.  Young fellows have never seen beauty like that, heard such a voice, seen such hair, such eyes.  Don’t tell me!  A man who has been about town since the reign of George IV., ought he not to know better than you young lads who have seen nothing?  The deterioration of women is lamentable; and the conceit of the young fellows more lamentable still, that they won’t see this fact, but persist in thinking their time as good as ours.

Bless me! when I was a lad, the stage was covered with angels, who sang, acted, and danced.  When I remember the Adelphi, and the actresses there:  when I think of Miss Chester, and Miss Love, and Mrs. Serle at Sadler’s Wells, and her forty glorious pupils—­of the Opera and Noblet, and the exquisite young Taglioni, and Pauline Leroux, and a host more!  One much-admired being of those days I confess I never cared for, and that was the chief male dancer—­a very important personage then, with a bare neck, bare arms, a tunic, and a hat and feathers, who used to divide the applause with the ladies, and who has now sunk down a trap-door for ever.  And this frank admission ought to show that I am not your mere twaddling laudator temporis acti—­your old fogy who can see no good except in his own time.