e are becoming dwarfed. The comedies that please them
are but pleasant caricatures of petty sections in a corrupt society.
They contain no large types of human nature; their witticisms convey no
luminous flashes of truth; their sentiment is not pure and noble,--it is
a sickly and false perversion of the impure and ignoble into travesties
of the pure and noble.

Their melodramas cannot be classed as literature: all that really
remains of the old French genius is its vaudeville. Great dramatists
create great parts. One great part, such as a Rachel would gladly have
accepted, I have not seen in the dramas of the young generation.

High art has taken refuge in the opera; but that is not French opera.
I do not complain so much that French taste is less refined. I complain
that French intellect is lowered. The descent from "Polyeucte" to "Ruy
Blas" is great, not so much in the poetry of form as in the elevation of
thought; but the descent from "Ruy Blas" to the best drama now produced
is out of poetry altogether, and into those flats of prose which give
not even the glimpse of a mountain-top.

But now to the opera. S------ in Norma! The house was crowded, and its
enthusiasm as loud as it was genuine. You tell me that S------ never
rivalled Pasta, but certainly her Norma is a great performance. Her
voice has lost less of its freshness than I had been told, and what is
lost of it her practised management conceals or carries off.

The Maestro was quite right: I could never vie with her in her own line;
but conceited and vain as I may seem even to you in saying so, I feel in
my own line that I could command as large an applause,--of course taking
into account my brief-lived advantage of youth. Her acting, apart from
her voice, does not please me. It seems to me to want intelligence of
the subtler feelings, the under-current of emotion which constitutes the
chief beauty of the situation and the character. Am I jealous when I say
this? Read on and judge.

On our return that night, when I had seen the Venosta to bed, I went
into my own room, opened the window, and looked out. A lovely night,
mild as in spring at Florence,--the moon at her full, and the stars
looking so calm and so high beyond our reach of their tranquillity. The
evergreens in the gardens of the villas around me silvered over, and the
summer boughs, not yet clothed with leaves, were scarcely visible amid
the changeless smile of the laurels. At the distance lay Pa