ng the pavement in front of the City Hall, where substantial food
was displayed and sold to the crowds collected to assist in celebrating
the day. About noon several military companies arrived upon the scene
and took their positions in the park, where, after a number of
interesting maneuvers, a salute was fired which was terrifying to my
youthful nerves. Small boys, then as now, provided themselves with
pistols, and human life was occasionally sacrificed to patriotic ardor,
although I never remember hearing of cases of lockjaw resulting from
such accidents, as is so frequently the case at present. Firecrackers
and torpedoes were then in vogue, but skyrockets and more elaborate
fireworks had not then come into general use. I do not recall that the
national flag was especially prominent upon the "glorious fourth," and
it is my impression that this insignia of patriotism was not universally
displayed upon patriotic occasions until the Civil War.

The musical world of New York lay dormant until about the year 1825,
when Dominick Lynch, much to the delight of the cultivated classes,
introduced the Italian Opera. Through his instrumentality Madame
Malibran, her father, Signor Garcia, and her brother, Manuel Garcia, who
by the way died abroad in 1906, nearly ninety-nine years of age, came to
this country and remained for quite a period. I have heard many sad
traditions regarding Malibran, whose name is certainly immortal in the
annals of the musical world. Mr. Lynch was the social leader of his day
in New York, was aesthetic in his tastes, and possessed a highly
cultivated voice. He frequently sang the beautiful old ballads so much
in vogue at that period. I have heard through Mrs. Samuel L. Hinckley,
an old friend of mine, who remembered the incident, that during a visit
to Boston when he sang Tom Moore's pathetic ballad, "Oft in the Stilly
Night," there was scarcely a dry eye in the room. In referring to the
introduction of the Italian Opera into this country Dr. John W. Francis
in his "Old New York" thus speaks of Dominick Lynch: "For this
advantageous accession to the resources of mental gratification, we were
indebted to the taste and refinement of Dominick Lynch, the liberality
of the manager of the Park Theater, Stephen Price, and the distinguished
reputation of the Venetian, Lorenzo Da Ponte. Lynch, a native of New
York, was the acknowledged head of the fashionable and festive board, a
gentleman of the ton and a melodis