the Ducal Banker. The great man lets his edifice
out to the municipality at so many thousand
scudi a year, but watches their doings jealously,
as, indeed, is only fitting with all municipality
doings. Let us look out an instant over the
edge of our box, upwards, at the high art,
projected on the plafond or ceiling, the theatrical
virgins, and general symbolical company who
usually reside in such regions; that is a pure
municipality conception—corporate high art. For
one night the corporate eye had been grievously
wounded, by what seems to be the inharmonious
groupings of the existing plafond, and the city
Ruskin, with his painters and artificers, is sent
in promptly to produce something more
consonant to the true canons of taste, and less
offending to corporate art canons. The
symbolical virgins are the result. With this result
also: the Ducal Banker, indignant at this
outrage on his property, protests against the high
art ceiling and the symbolical virgins, and
immediately brings an action in the superior courts
against the municipality. With what issue I
cannot now recollect.

Looking over the edge of our penitential cell,
we may rake, with powerful double lens revolver,
that long curve below, consecrated as the nobleman's
tier, and may bring within easy range the
persons of quality there reposing gracefully. I
recognise their familiar faces: my noble Roman
of the sallow cheeks, now finished with his daily
driving, and the pale noble lady, who has come
for a short distraction from her great gloomy
chambers. It is, after all, no more than the
closing or finishing round in that fashionable
mill in which she takes her penal servitude; and
having already hearkened to this brassy tempest
of the Maestro Verdi, some eighteen or twenty
times, the edge of novelty may be taken to
have worn off. Still she is there, asserting
her place, in half-shadow, in the hemicycle of
the immortals. It is a curious thing this strict
flocking together of noble birds of a feather.
And by that token I see from this aerie some
whose feathers, it is whispered, have been ruffled,
ever so little—not worth mentioning, perhaps,
and scarcely perceptible, except to a nicely moral
eye. It is for all the world an animated bit of
heraldry, a living edition of Sir Bernard's Peerage,
stretched out violently into a semicircular
scroll. A current of blue blood courses round
that august channel. True, there are a few
untitled outsiders, who, by patient waiting and
setting of names down for years, as it might be,
at an almost impregnable club, have slipped in;
but this is only a case of rare exception.

For whom is that sort of royal stage-box to
the left kept? For King Torlonia, ducal banker,
lord of the building; and it runs out behind,
as other royal boxes do, into great saloons and
reception-chambers. The humbler royal box,
directly vis-à-vis, accommodates the magnificos
of the municipality: a deputation from which
body attends, and is obliged to attend, every
night of performance. The Ducal Banker—as
has been mentioned—leases his building to the
municipality, and this body holds it in trust for
the citizens. It is, as it were, the people's
theatre, and the deputation enthroned in splendour
represent the people. As a little bit of
fancy speculation I conjure up the images of
Alderman Sir R. Carden, with Mr. Alderman
Moon, together with a third brother of
civic obesity and unmusical tastes, being
required, under compulsion, to come down and
occupy a municipal box at the Royal Italian
Opera, Covent Garden. I strain the imagination
still further, and feebly strive to entertain the
amusing conceit of a London City corporation
indulging in such a piece of liberality as renting
a theatre for its citizens; but here that
useful faculty recoils from such absurdly hostile
contradictions. These Roman officials are
supreme and autocratic. The singer carries away
his hearers in a torrent of bravos and frantic
applause, but there shall be no encore unsanctioned
by authority; and orchestra chief durst
not move his bâton, for repetition of the
symphony, without nod of approval from a municipal
head. Sometimes there is unseemly collision
between these authorities and that vox populi,
which they decline to recognise as the higher
and more divine voice, supposed to be synonymous.
Municipality, true to municipal tradition,
is pig-headed and stubborn, the people shrill and
effervescent, and the dispute is usually happily
terminated by an unfair appeal to cocked-hatdom
and chinking spurs and sabres. Strange to say,
these civic functionaries seem to-night to be
young and dandified, ply their glasses
industriously, and look as unlike common councilmen
as can well be imagined.

But there are other gentlemen clothed with
other mysterious powers—and clothed, too, in
elegant evening dress—whom enthusiasm for
music, and the attraction of Il Maestro Verdi's
music, have drawn from their retirement. These
fanaticos sit by preference in one special box on
the pit tier, exactly in the centre of the house,
and fronting the stage. There we may look for
them, and there we may be sure to find them,
one busy with his glass, the other with his book,
from which he scarcely ever lifts his eyes. The
fanaticos are policemen from Signor Matteucci's
office, and really seem to enjoy their night in a
gentlemanly unofficial fashion, unburdened by
the awkward sense of duty. But would you
know why Policeman X is so deeply interested
in his book of the words, following every
sentence with his eyes glued to the page? I will
give it to you in one, in two, in forty, in a
hundred, as lively Madame de Sévigné puts it.
You will not come within a parasang of it.
Policeman X—he holds his book in kid gloves,
and I will swear has varnished boots—is the
singers' policeman. He looks after them warily,
for there have been instances on record of
political singers. It has happened before now, that
incendiary words, of ambiguous application,
carefully expunged by censors, have been
restored by enthusiastic singers, and have, as a
natural consequence, been rapturously caught
up by audience, and turned into peg for hanging
"a demonstration" on. Nay, there are little