Since my dear old friend Italo Campanini there has been no one to match Caruso. Italo was a greater actor, indeed more versatile. His Lohengrin, the first I ever heard, I shall never forget. Mr. Finck is happy in his suggestion that Caruso add Lohengrin to his long list of operatic portraits. I have heard tenors from Brignoli to Gayarre, from Campanini to Tamagno, Masini and Nicolini--this second husband of Aunt Adelina Patti wasn’t such a mediocrity as represented by some critics; he suffered only from contiguity to a blazing star of the first magnitude--yet no one possessed a tithe of the vocal richness of Camerado Enrico. Some have outpointed him in finesse, Bonci; Tamagno could have outroared him; Jean de Reszke had more personal charm and artistic subtlety; nevertheless, Caruso has a marvellous natural voice, paved with lyric magic. It is positively torrential in its outpouring, and with the years it grows as mellow as a French horn. Why, there are men in this vast land of ours who would rather be Caruso than the President of the United States of Europe. Can you blame them? In his golden prime, happily mated, full of verve, gayety--and healthy--well, his presence, apart from his art, consoles us for many a gray day on this ocky little orb we inhabit. The recognition of personality has become in my “middle-years” a veritable obsession. With Henry James I could say that “I have found myself, my life long, attaching values to every noted thing in respect to a great person.” Please strike out “great” from this sentence and substitute “any”; any person is interesting to me. Himself exquisitely aware of the presence of others, Henry James placed his fastidious preference amid certain castes, social and artistic. Like Walt Whitman, I prefer the company of “powerful uneducated persons,” and nothing inhuman or human is foreign to me. I shouldn’t be surprised to find more interesting “stories” among the members of the chorus than in the ranks of the “stars”; but the “stars” alone capture the curiosity of the public, and thus it is that I speak of some of them to-day instead of la bella ragazzina in Mr. Setti’s forces. I was bundled on Manager Gatti’s special car and promptly paid my fare to a conductor who suspiciously appraised my presence; to him I was neither fish nor flesh, nor good red chorus. I should have liked very much to walk through the chorus car, but with Otto Weil on one side and Edward Ziegler on the other I couldn’t escape; furthermore, young Ziegler thus admonished me: “Sir, it’s no place for an elderly inflammable person, is that car full of pretty young song-birds; Pattis and Scalchis en herbe.” I meekly submitted and found myself in a smoking-compartment where a card-table was promptly installed.