ing
down the house.' How to manage this was difficult; for the scene was
so set that it seemed scarcely possible to hand her up 'the pewter'
without its being witnessed by the audience. After much consultation,
Malibran having been assured that her wish should be fulfilled, it was
arranged that the pot of porter should be handed up to her through a
trap in the stage at the moment when Jules had thrown himself on her
body, supposing that life had fled; and Mr. Templeton was drilled into
the manner in which he should so manage to conceal the necessary
arrangement, that the audience would never suspect what was going on.
At the right moment a friendly hand put the foaming pewter through the
stage, to be swallowed at a draught, and success was won!... Malibran,
however, had not overestimated her own strength. She knew that it
wanted but this fillip to carry her through. She had resolved to have
an encore, and she had it, in such a fashion as made the roof of 'Old
Drury' ring as it had never rung before. On the repetition of the
opera and afterwards, a different arrangement of the stage was made,
and a property calabash containing a pot of porter was used; but
although the same result was constantly won, Malibran always said it
was not half so 'nice,' nor did her anything like the good it would
have done if she could only have had it out of the pewter." Clara
Louise Kellogg in her very lively "Memoirs" publishes a similar tale
of another singer: "It was told of Grisi that when she was growing old
and severe exertion told on her she always, after her fall as Lucrezia
Borgia, drank a glass of beer sent up to her through the floor, lying
with her back half turned to the audience." Miss Kellogg complains of
the breaths of the tenors she sang with: "Stigelli usually exhaled an
aroma of lager beer; while the good Mazzoleni invariably ate from one
to two pounds of cheese the day he was to sing. He said it
strengthened his voice. Many of them affected garlic." It is
necessary, of course, that a singer should know what foods agree with
him. He must keep himself in excellent physical condition: small
wonder that many artists are superstitious in this regard.

Charles Santley, who was so fond of eating and drinking himself,
offers some excellent advice on the subject in "Student and Singer":
"How the voice is produced or where, except that it is through the
passage of the throat, is unimportant; it is reasonable to say that
the passag