used to dance! There has never been anything like
it--never. There never will be--I laugh to scorn old people who tell me
about your Noblet, your Montessu, your Vestris, your Parisot--pshaw, the
senile twaddlers! And the impudence of the young men, with their
music and their dancers of to-day! I tell you the women are dreary old
creatures. I tell you one air in an opera is just like another, and they
send all rational creatures to sleep. Ah, Ronzi de Begnis, thou lovely
one! Ah, Caradoni, thou smiling angel! Ah, Malibran! Nay, I will come
to modern times, and acknowledge that Lablache was a very good singer
thirty years ago (though Porto was the boy for me): and then we had
Ambrogetti, and Curioni, and Donzelli, a rising young singer.

But what is most certain and lamentable is the decay of stage beauty
since the days of George IV. Think of Sontag! I remember her in Otello
and the Donna del Lago in '28. I remember being behind the scenes at
the opera (where numbers of us young fellows of fashion used to go), and
seeing Sontag let her hair fall down over her shoulders previous to
her murder by Donzelli. Young fellows have never seen beauty like THAT,
heard such a voice, seen such hair, such eyes. Don't tell ME! A man who
has been about town since the reign of George IV., ought he not to know
better than you young lads who have seen nothing? The deterioration
of women is lamentable; and the conceit of the young fellows more
lamentable still, that they won't see this fact, but persist in thinking
their time as good as ours.

Bless me! when I was a lad, the stage was covered with angels, who sang,
acted, and danced. When I remember the Adelphi, and the actresses there:
when I think of Miss Chester, and Miss Love, and Mrs. Serle at Sadler's
Wells, and her forty glorious pupils--of the Opera and Noblet, and
the exquisite young Taglioni, and Pauline Leroux, and a host more! One
much-admired being of those days I confess I never cared for, and that
was the chief MALE dancer--a very important personage then, with a bare
neck, bare arms, a tunic, and a hat and feathers, who used to divide
the applause with the ladies, and who has now sunk down a trap-door for
ever. And this frank admission ought to show that I am not your mere
twaddling laudator temporis acti--your old fogy who can see no good
except in his own time.

They say that claret is better now-a-days, and cookery much improved
since the days of MY monarch--of George I