have been at the root of Agostino’s dread of an anticlimax.  The seconda donna had the chief part in it—­notably an aria (Rocco had given it to her in compassion) that suited Irma’s pure shrieks and the tragic skeleton she could be.  Vittoria knew how low she was sinking when she found her soul in the shallows of a sort of jealousy of Irma.  For a little space she lost all intimacy with herself; she looked at her face in the glass and swallowed water, thinking that she had strained a dream and confused her brain with it.  The silence of her solitary room coming upon the blaze of light the colour and clamour of the house, and the strange remembrance of the recent impersonation of an ideal character, smote her with the sense of her having fallen from a mighty eminence, and that she lay in the dust.  All those incense-breathing flowers heaped on her table seemed poisonous, and reproached her as a delusion.  She sat crouching alone till her tirewomen called; horrible talkative things! her own familiar maid Giacinta being the worst to bear with.

Now, Michiella, by making love to Leonardo, Camillo’s associate, discovers that Camillo is conspiring against her father.  She utters to Leonardo very pleasant promises indeed, if he will betray his friend.  Leonardo, a wavering baritono, complains that love should ask for any return save in the coin of the empire of love.  He is seduced, and invokes a malediction upon his head should he accomplish what he has sworn to perform.  Camilla reposes perfect confidence in this wretch, and brings her more doubtful husband to be of her mind.

Camillo and Camilla agree to wear the mask of a dissipated couple.  They throw their mansion open; dicing, betting, intriguing, revellings, maskings, commence.  Michiella is courted ardently by Camillo; Camilla trifles with Leonardo and with Count Orso alternately.  Jealous again of Camilla, Michiella warns and threatens Leonardo; but she becomes Camillo’s dupe, partly from returning love, partly from desire for vengeance on her rival.  Camilla persuades Orso to discard Michiella.  The infatuated count waxes as the personification of portentous burlesque; he is having everything his own way.  The acting throughout—­owing to the real gravity of the vast basso Lebruno’s burlesque, and Vittoria’s archness—­was that of high comedy with a lurid background.  Vittoria showed an enchanting spirit of humour.  She sang one bewitching barcarole that set the house in rocking motion.  There was such melancholy in her heart that she cast herself into all the flippancy with abandonment.  The Act was weak in too distinctly revealing the finger of the poetic political squib at a point here and there.  The temptation to do it of an Agostino, who had no other outlet, had been irresistible, and he sat moaning over his artistic depravity, now that it stared him in the face.  Applause scarcely consoled him, and it was with humiliation of mind that he acknowledged his debt to the music and the singers, and how little they owed to him.