to Oxford. He has a tremendous house
in Tyburnia, with a footman—a real foot-man,
in plush and powder. Why did not the
paternal Papadaggi, dead in Leghorn yonder,
live to see the day? P. the Second and Great
is a little man, but he drives a monumental
cab drawn by a big brown horse—a very
horse of Troy—that moves with a sort of
swelling cadence of motion, as if he were
practising Mozart's Requiem to himself. It
is good to see honest Papadaggi behind the
big horse; a regulation tiger hanging on
behind, and the music master's little body
gently swaying with the curvetings of his
steed. It is good to hear the thundering
knock of the regulation tiger at the door of
number six hundred and six A, Plesiosaurus
Gardens West, where Papadaggi is about to
give three-quarters of an hour's singing lesson
for a guinea. It is good to see Papadaggi toddle
out of his cab in the lightest of varnished
boots, and the brightest of lemon-coloured
gloves, and to note the respect with which the
golden footmen receive him, and the easy
patronage with which he passes them, mounts
the stairs, gives his lesson, and lunches
with Madame la Comtesse and the youthful
Ladies.

Once a year, Papadaggi gives his Grand
Morning Concert at the Nineveh Rooms,
Arrow-head Street, Cuneiform Square, in
which rooms, the Nineveh Subscription
Balls are given—balls to which (without
unimpeachable vouchers from the leaders
of the world) admission is as difficult as to
the Eleusinian mysteries. In the Nineveh
Rooms, with their huge tarnished pier glasses,
walls of a pale dirty blue, with cracked stucco
ornaments, and faded benches and ottomans:
which two last articles of furniture are no
strangers to a certain lively insect—the punex
aristocraticus, or fashionable fleas—our friend's
Grand Concert takes place. For some days
previous, the doorway of the Nineveh Rooms
is blockaded, to the profound disgust of the
Church of England Young Men's Table-turning
Association, and the Society for the
Protection of Stewed-eel Sellers, with gigantic
posting boards, in which a weak-minded
printer has seemingly gone raving mad in
different coloured inks and varieties of
eccentric type: howling in large capitalled
prime donne, babbling in fat-lettered
instrumentalists, melancholy mad in smaller type
respecting Pappadaggi's residence and the
principal music warehouses where tickets,
price half-a-guinea each (stalls fifteen
shillings) may be had, and a plan of the rooms
is on view.

I don't think it would be an unpardonable
vulgarism to call Papadaggi's poster a stunner.
It literally stuns you, so tremendous
is its size, so marvellous are the
attractions it promises, so brilliant are the
celebrities who are to appear. Papadaggi
has everybody. The Opera stars; the famous
Lurliety, who was a fixed star last season,
but has taken it into his head lately to become
a meteor; Basserclyffe; little Miss Larke;
Nightingale, of course; Soundinbord Smasherr,
the world-renowned Swedish pianist, just
returned from America; Madame Katinka
Kralski, who plays tunes nobody can find the
beginning or end of, upon a new instrument,
the pifferarinium, which has just been
patented and completed, at the cost of some
thousands of pounds by Piccolo, and which
looks very much like a piano-forte turned
inside out; Herr Bompazek, the great
German basso; little Klitz, the flautist, who
goes everywhere, and whom everybody knows;
and greatest attraction of all, the astonishing
Panslavisco, that Mogul of Harpists, that
dark mysterious child of genius, whose
present popularity exceeds the greatest
ever achieved by Paganini, the Whistling
Oyster, the Hippopotamus, the Great Anteater
or General Tom Thumb. Besides these,
there are multitudes of smaller musical
notorieties, native and foreign, vocalists and
instrumentalists: from the Misses Gooch, of
the .Royal Academy of Music, the pleasing
ballad singers, to hard-working Tom Muffler,
who means to do something with the big
drum yet.

I am afraid the bénéficiare does not pay
many of his artists. You see he is so fashionable,
so run after, that it is rather an honour
than otherwise to sing for him gratis. The
Misses Gooch can truly affirm themselves to
be of the nobility's concerts when they go
starring round the provinces in the autumn
after they have sung for a year or two at P.'s
Grand Musical Festival. A great many
professionals sing for Papadaggi through pure
friendship and goodwill, for the little man is
universally liked and respected. A great
many sing because others sing, and a great
many more because they want to be heard at
any risk. The bird that can sing and
won't sing is a rara avis. I never knew a
bird that could sing but that would sing,
whether his hearers liked it or not; and I
even know a great many birds that can't
sing and oughtn't to sing, who will sing.
Papadaggi, however, does not get all the
professionals gratuitously. Orpheus Basserclyffe,
with whom fifteen guineas for a song is
as much a fixed idea as the cultivation of
his garden was with Candide, say?, " I'll
sing, by all means, but I must have the cash,
Pap, my boy;" and Pap pays him: while
old Grabbatoui, the renowned performer on
the violoncello, contents himself with saying
every year as he pockets his eight guineas,
"Next year, mio caro, I play for noting—
for noting—yes!" but, somehow or other,
with Grabbatoni that next year never
comes.

We will suppose the momentous day to
have arrived, and Papadaggi's Grand Concert
to have commenced. The carriages of the
nobility and gentry, and the cabs of the
public in general, block up Nineveh Street;