Hawthorne heard her in England, and “on the whole, was not very much interested in her.” Thackeray wrote his wife from Cambridge, England: “Then we went to Jenny Lind’s concert, for which a gentleman here gave us tickets, and at the end of the first act we agreed to come away. It struck me as atrociously stupid. I was thinking of something else the whole time she was jugulating away, and O! I was so glad to get to the end and have a cigar, and I wanted so to go away with Mr. Williams, for I feel entirely out of place in this town.” It is significant that Carlyle and Thackeray, and as we shall see when we come to America, Walt Whitman, were all dissenters from the Lind religious wave, but it does not necessarily mean that she did not have a good voice. It does seem to indicate clearly, however, taken along with the evidence of Mendelssohn’s reluctant admission, that she did not sing good music. Then, too, the very extravagance of the popular mania with its false sentiment and absurd idolatry were likely to prejudice these men against what had been heralded to them as a phenomenon of the ages and what turned out to be only a benevolent soul coupled with a lovely voice, who usually sang most commonplace and oftentimes dull music to the accompaniment of large-scale fatuity upon the part of her doting audiences. III Jenny Lind went to England in April, 1847, and was greeted cordially by Mendelssohn, who was conducting four performances in London of his new oratorio, _Elijah_. She was also welcomed by her friends, Grote, the historian, and his wife. She made her début at Lumely’s Her Majesty’s Theater on May 4, 1847, and the excitement was intense. From early hours in the afternoon, until half-past seven when the doors were opened, crowds stood outside in the Haymarket, and when the theater was finally opened, there was a crush which was named later “the Jenny Lind crush,” in which gentlemen lost their hats and ladies parts of their dresses. Before she sang a note the audiences applauded loudly, and after her concerts the newspapers were extravagant in their adulation.