the coachmen doze on their boxes; the
neighbouring public-houses are full of the
silken valves and gilt-knobbed sticks of the
splendid footmen. Within, the ladies are
ranged upon the faded ottomans—a beautiful
show. There are peeresses, bishopesses
judgesses, bankeresses,
stock-brokeresses, and merchant-princesses.
Papadaggi has just handed a duchess to a seat;
and is at this moment whispering soft
compliments to a cabinet-ministress, with
admirable equanimity and self-possession. The
whiskers are resplendent; the boots shine
like patent leather stars accidentally fallen
from the firmament. The room is very full
and very hot, and many of the dandies,
unable to find seats, lean their all-round
collars against walls, so to support their
weary frames. A vicious family from
Peckham Rye (a mamma, three daughters, an
aunt, and a melancholy governess) have
fallen upon and utterly routed an imbecile
young man in a feeble white neckcloth, who
acts as checktaker for the stalls, and who holds
a crimson worsted cord across the space
between the last ottoman and the wall. The
vicious family have only tickets for the back
seats; but, having utterly demolished the
imbecile young man, and driven him before
them like chaff before the wind, they make
a razzia into the stalls, and nearly overthrow
a stockbroker's colony from Maida Hill, the
members of which gather themselves up
indignantly, and whisper among themselves
disparagingly, "City people!" Old General
Jupp, who has sent his family to the concert
before him, and has walked down from the
Cutcherry Club, has found that he has left
his ticket behind him, and has had to
pay over again at the doors, and can't
find his party, and sits apart in a corner
on a cane-bottomed chair, muttering
horribly. A meek-eyed young dandy, who has
come in cloth boots, with his hair curled
(he must be an only son with a taste for
music, who fancies he can sing second in a
quartett) can't find Thrummer, the musical
clerk in the Treasury, who sings The Wolf
so capitally, and promised to point out all
the musical celebrities to him. He cannot,
indeed, find anybody that he knows, nor a
place anywhere, and is repining secretly on
the staircase, where he looks so miserable
that the money-taker, a rosy man who
officiates as a waiter at the London Tavern
o' nights, and sometimes takes a spell in the
black work or undertaking line of business.
compassionates him, and is half-inclined,
were he not so great a dandy, to offer him
some of the beer from the pint pot under his
chair. There are a great many foreigners in
the concert-room, who come with free admissions,
as it is the custom of musical foreigners
to do; two or three critics attached to the
morning newspapers, who listen to the
songs with a knowing air and their
heads on one side, as if they knew
perfectly well what the next bar was to be;
and a country gentleman, who has come up
to town to attend a meeting of the Church of
England Young Men's Table-turning
Association, and has blundered into Papadaggi's
concert-room by mistake, where he sits listening
to the performances with a bewildered air.

Papadaggi's concert proceeds swimmingly.
To be sure, the order of the programme is
not strictly observed—the song that should
be first frequently coming last, and vice
versa. Such misadventures will, however,
happen in the best regulated morning
concerts. Codlinetti, the Italian buffo-singer,
who is of a capricious and changeable
temperament, suddenly changes the song for
which he is put down, to one of an entirely
different character: to the indignation of
Peddle, who is the accompanyist (presides at
the pianoforte we believe is the appropriate
words), who is a morose man, and insists upon
playing the symphony to the original song;
upon which Codlinetti, under shadow of
turning over the music and showing Peddle
the proper place, manifests a strong desire to
fling him over the orchestra among the
duchesses. Fraulein Ninni Stolzappel, the
charming warbler of German Lieds, has likewise
objected to the unfortunate man's
accompaniment to her song, and at the end
of a cadence, and in a voice audible even to
General Jupp in the corner, has called
Peddle " Pig," in the German language;
whereat life becomes a burden to Peddle,
and as he pounds the keys as though they
were his enemies, he devoutly wishes that he
were back in his quiet attic in the Royal
Academy of Music, Tenterden Street,
Hanover Square. Papadaggi neither plays
nor sings. He is too learned to do anything;
but he hovers about the orchestra, and hands
singers on and off, and pervades the concert
with his whiskers and white neckcloth—so
that a considerable portion of the applause
is meant for Papadaggi, and is by Papadaggi
taken unto himself with many bows and
smiles. Did you never know people who
somehow seem to have a vested interest in
the fruits of everybody's labours? There is
scarcely a great picture painted, a book
written, a palace built, a good deed done, but
it turns out that somebody is entitled to
considerable praise, or must be honourably
mentioned in connection with it, though as
far as your judgment went he never put a
finger to the work, or a stone to the edifice.
The number of unknown benefactors and
passive great men is astonishing. I see their
names in the literary pension list; I find parliament
making them grants every session; I
hear their healths proposed at public dinners,
and see them get up, covered with modesty
to return thanks, when they bashfully allude
to the things they have been instrumental in
carrying out, though for the life of me I
can't make out what they ever had to do with
anything.