al skill, the amount of training bestowed on the singers and
dancers, greater than that which produces great men, and the company
before the curtain, together with reflections thereanent. It is a piece
of forcible description, and of thoughtful though perhaps rather
one-sided reflection. As we heard it remarked a few days ago by a shrewd
critic, Carlyle is never so much himself as when he appears in the
character of another--for examples, in that of the strolling lecturer,
who left with his unpaid lodging-house keeper a denunciation of modern
philanthropists, or in that of the correspondent whose letters he quotes
in the Life of Sterling. In the disguise of a Yankee philosopher he thus
breaks out, after some serious and highly-wrought prefatory phrases on
the glories of true music, while yet true music partook of the divine:

"Of the account of the Haymarket Opera my account, in fine, is
this: Lustres, candelabras, painting, gilding at discretion: a
hall as of the Caliph Alraschid, or him that commanded the
slaves of the Lamp; a hall as if fitted up by the genies,
regardless of expense. Upholstery and the outlay of human
capital, could do no more. Artists, too, as they are called,
have been got together from the ends of the world, regardless
likewise of expense, to do dancing and singing, some of them
even geniuses in their craft. One singer in particular, called
Coletti, or some such name, seemed to me, by the cast of his
face, by the tones of his voice, by his general bearing, so far
as I could read it, to be a man of deep and ardent
sensibilities, of delicate intuitions, just sympathies;
originally an almost poetic soul, or man of _genius_, as we
term it; stamped by Nature as capable of far other work than
squalling here, like a blind Samson to make the Philistines
sport! Nay, all of them had aptitudes, perhaps of a
distinguished kind; and must, by their own and other people's
labor, have got a training equal or superior in toilsomeness,
earnest assiduity, and patient travail, to what breeds men to
the most arduous trades. I speak not of kings' grandees, or the
like show-figures; but few soldiers, judges, men of letters,
can have had such pains taken with them. The very ballet girls,
with their muslin saucers round them, were perhaps little short
of miraculous; whirling and spinning there in st