in exercise of its fresh reasoning power. While
the many learn to watch with a new intelligence
the public actions of the few, that which they
have in all generations observed keenly is more
fitted than it ever before was, to endure their
scrutiny.

Between the rich and the poor, strong and
direct ties have been recognised on both sides,
and the improved tone of the more prosperous
classes of society has been in no small degree
assured, as it is marked most strongly, by the
character of the first household in the land.
We need not dwell upon that which every
Englishman distinctly feels. When the wedding
procession the other day was passing to the
Mansion House, and when the absurd City authorities
having pressed nearly as many people as London-
bridge could hold, at the last moment, out upon
the streets through which the prince and princess
were to pass; when, the City police being
useless, the people joining hand to hand pressed
back, and with pain and difficulty themselves
made clear the way that should have been kept;
a costermonger is said to have pressed forward,
and with ill-mannered cordiality offered his hand
to the princess whom all this show was to greet.
The princess took the offered hand. The
costermonger certainly was rude and stupid; but
the act as certainly typified the spirit of human
friendship that now binds the highest with the
lowest, and which, diffused through every crowd,
fills it with incidents of kindliness, casts out the
old brutalities, and makes a crush among
unfashionable people in the Poultry, even more full
of true courtesy than a fashionable crush at a
Court Drawing-Room.

SHAKESPEARE MUSIC.

IN THREE ACTS.
SECOND ACT. PLAYS OF PASSION.

AMONG what may be called the passion-plays
of Shakespeare, there has been none so
perpetually set and set again in the operatic form as
Romeo and Juliet. Yet there is no play which
offers more difficulties: because, for only a single
reason among many, it is the play in which youth
can be the least dispensed with; not to speak of
personal beauty. There has been only one opera
male Romeo possible during the last half century
—Signor Mario. The homely Rubini, in his
homeliness guiltless of the slightest offence of
attempting action—the more energetic, but not
less singular-looking Duprez—could not, by any
magic, have been endured in the balcony scene.
So that to meet so great a difficulty (greater,
perhaps, in opera than in spoken tragedy), it
has been found advisable to make a travesty-
part of the lover of Verona.—This cannot be
done without weakening the entire musical
structure of the work, and also every chance of
its stage effect, unless, indeed, the Romeo
happens to be called Pasta. And then, he has to
be matched with a Juliet: and in nine cases
out of ten, a competent singing Juliet must be
an experienced, mature woman. But these
manifest anomalies, so many things not to be
escaped from, would seem never to have
suggested themselves to the easy-going folk who
take names for ideas, and who will

                                     Slish and slash

                 (Like to a censer in a barber's shop)

Shakespeare's most poetical imaginings and most
delicate thoughts, for the sake of a love-duet or
a cemetery-scene. Nevertheless, these may
amount to a cause why, among so many Romeo
and Juliet operas as are now to be enumerated,
there is not one that remains, or should remain.
It has been said that M. Gounod is, at the time
being, trying to solve the problem.

The earliest musical Romeo and Juliet,
perhaps—or it may have been merely a setting of a
single scene or situation by one who was fond
of such exercise (as a duo-drame on the story of
Ariadne, in its time popular, attested), is that by
George Benda—for a while one of Frederick the
Great's musical staff-officers, who got some training,
in the military orchestra of the inexorable,
flute-playing, philosophic king, but who seems to
have been in advance of his time, though not a
note (how sad this seems!) of his music has come
down to us.—There was an attempt on it made
by a more innocuous Herr Schwanenberg, of
Wolfenbuttel (fancy a musical composer settled
at Newport, Isle of Wight, Wolfenbuttel
having been merely a summer place, to which
those reigning in Brunswick resorted).—There
was a Baron Sigismond von Rumling, an Alsatian,
it appears, who devoted himself to the
Veronese lovers.—Herr Steibelt, the pianoforte
player (a charming melodist, whose Storm
Concerto ranged with the Battle of Prague in
popularity, and whose Spanish tune inspired Keats
to write words for it, " Hush! hush! tread
softly"), treated this tale for the Opéra Comique
of Paris with some success. The charming
Madame Scio, whom Cherubini's Medea killed by
its strain on her voice, was the Juliet.—Steibelt's
music is too good to have deserved perishing so
completely as it has done. Some of the scenes
have sweetness and picturesque feeling: the
want with him being power and stage experience.
There is another French Romeo and Juliet, by
Dalayrac, whose Nina is remembered by hearsay,
but not a note of the Shakespeare music
survives.

Five Italian operas recur at once to recollection:
one by Marescalchi (a mere name); two by
Guglielmi, a showy and slight composer, who
flourished at the close of the last century; by
Zingarelli, the prolific; by Vaccai; and by the
more famous Bellini. One and all are weakly
unsatisfactory: the admirable Pasta, when she
conceived the character of Romeo ("attempted"
was her modest word), took with a royal license
everything that pleased her from every opera,
and made up a mosaic for herself, the recollection
of which is among the imperishable things
of art. Since her day, there has been no Romeo
on the stage worthy of mention, no version of
Crescentini's "Ombra adorata" (one among her
appropriations) welcome in a concert-room.
Her love-making had an intensity, her distress a