When night was come, Glanmoregain again made his appearance, having previously extended an invitation, to escort the general to the opera.  And as Tickler was about to perform so important a part in his project, he could do no less than invite him also.  Vain of the importance he imagined himself possessing in the eyes of the public, the general was with some difficulty restrained from mounting his uniform, which he held necessary, lest he be confounded with some ordinary individual without claim to popular favor.  Having persuaded him to forego this unnecessary display, the three sallied out together, and soon arrived at what is curiously called the Academy of Music, a building which several friends of the writer of this history, and who are gentlemen of acknowledged taste, declare to be unexcelled for splendor and beauty of architecture, not even excepting the La Scala, St. Carlo, Covent Garden, or even the Tacon.  With all deference for the opinions of my accomplished friends, I must confess that the exterior of the building struck me as a huge, square mass of brick much disfigured with awkward looking windows and common place lintels.  Indeed, it might easily have been mistaken for a charity hospital; and in the absence of a front, discovering the slightest architectural grandeur, bore no small resemblance to an absurdly constructed barracks.

Entering what in a church would be designated a vestibule, but which here served as a convenient place for loitering gentlemen who speculate in tickets, and the only visible furniture of which had been reformed down to a cheap chandelier, they passed on through a narrow baize door, flanked on one side by an oily ticket taker, and on the other by a fashionably dressed and bearded gentleman, whom the manager, in his praiseworthy efforts to please a capricious public, seemed to have placed there for the ostensible purpose of staring in the faces of ladies, and so circumscribing the width of the passage as to render it exceedingly difficult of ingress.  They passed on into the “dress circle,” where the seats were peculiarly adapted for making the back ache, and soon found that they had got behind a huge column, (of which there were many similar ones,) where no human eye could get a glimpse of the stage, though the unfortunate visitor paid ten dollars for his seat.  As to the interior of the house, it forcibly reminded me of an immense gypsum quarry, with rudely excavated galleries, forming such a jumble and confusion of lines, that it was in vain you looked for an architectural beauty.  Indeed, I venture to assert, that such a huge conglomerate of plaster and cheap gilt never before decorated one edifice, and that dedicated to high art.  And if the uncouth images, with limbs of giants and heads of ordinary females, which met the eye at every turn, were to be accepted in proof of the high standard of taste at which we had arrived, then surely plaster and gilt ought to form the motto.  Figures of