llan.

'How Wagner seems to have stricken the Italians! Well, now, the Germans
have their Emperor to head their armies, and I say that the German
emperor has done less for their lasting fame and influence than Wagner
has done. He has affected the French too; I trace him in Gounod's Romeo
et Juliette--and we don't gain by it; we have a poor remuneration for
the melody gone; think of the little shepherd's pipeing in Mireille; and
there's another in Sapho-delicious. I held out against Wagner as long as
I could. The Italians don't much more than Wagnerize in exchange for
the loss of melody. They would be wiser in going back to Pergolese,
Campagnole. The Mefistofole was good--of the school of the foreign
master. Aida and Otello, no. I confess to a weakness for the old
barleysugar of Bellini or a Donizetti-Serenade. Aren't you seduced by
cadences? Never mind Wagner's tap of his paedagogue's baton--a cadence
catches me still. Early taste for barley-sugar, perhaps! There's a march
in Verdi's Attila and I Lombardi, I declare I'm in military step when
I hear them, as in the old days, after leaving the Opera. Fredi takes
little Mab Mountney to her first Opera to-night. Enough to make us old
ones envious! You remember your first Opera, Fenellan? Sonnambula, with
me. I tell you, it would task the highest poetry--say, require, if
you like--showing all that's noblest, splendidest, in a young man, to
describe its effect on me. I was dreaming of my box at the Opera for
a year after. The Huguenots to-night. Not the best suited for little
Mabsy; but she'll catch at the Rataplan. Capital Opera; we used to
think it the best, before we had Tannhauser and Lohengrin and the
Meistersinger.'

Victor hinted notes of the Conspiration Scene closing the Third Act of
the Huguenots. That sombre Chorus brought Mrs. Burman before him. He
drummed the Rataplan, which sent her flying. The return of a lively
disposition for dinner and music completed his emancipation from the
yoke of the baleful creature sitting half her days in the chemist's
shop; save that a thought of drugs brought the smell, and the smell the
picture; she threatened to be an apparition at any moment pervading him
through his nostrils. He spoke to Fenellan of hunger for dinner, a need
for it; singular in one whose appetite ran to the stroke of the hour
abreast with Armandine's kitchen-clock. Fenellan proposed a glass of
sherry and bitters at his Club over the way. He had forgotten a sho