A host in herself, Madame Sontag is powerfully seconded. The management of the Opera House, aware of the danger of trusting for success to any one singer, however eminent, to the neglect of that general excellence essential to an effective operatic company, has shown great activity, and has been exceedingly fortunate, in filling those vacancies left by the defections already alluded to. Of first appearances, the most remarkable this season has been that of a young tenor, who has at once taken a very high place amongst that rare class of singers. Since Mario made his debut, a dozen years ago, on the boards of the _Académie Royale_, Beaucarde is the only pure tenor who has come forward that can fairly be considered a first-rate. Mario, although his debut was decidedly successful, was little appreciated for some time after his first appearance, and, when desirous to transfer himself to the Italian stage, the manager of the French Opera readily cancelled his engagement on a nominal forfeit. The world knows the excellence, both as actor and singer, to which he has since attained. Beaucarde has come before the London public with more experience of the stage than Mario possessed when he first presented himself to the Parisians, and he has become immediately highly and most deservedly popular. Could any doubt of his excellence have existed in the minds of those who had heard him in other parts, his singing and acting of _Arturo_ in the _Puritani_ must at once have dissipated them. Tenderness and elegance marked his delivery of the whole of that graceful music, which displayed his beautiful quality of voice to the utmost advantage. Beaucarde is a very young man, and a very young singer. His father, a French engineer officer, who had settled at Florence after Napoleon's fall, intended him for a painter; but his own bias was for music, the study of which he secretly and enthusiastically pursued. It is not yet two years since his father's death left him at liberty to follow his own inclinations. With great difficulty he obtained an engagement at a second-rate theatre in his native city. There he was so little appreciated that, after being several months before the public, he was refused the very humble salary of two hundred pounds a-year. He was not discouraged. Perhaps he thought of Rubini--how that tenor of tenors, in his early days, could obtain no better place wherein to warble than a squalid booth at a country festival. Many who knew him in his after period of unrivalled prosperity and renown, will remember, in that room full of trophies, amidst plate and jewels bestowed upon him by kings and emperors, where the eye was dazzled with the glitter of gold and diamonds, a certain picture frame which he was wont to turn round and exhibit to his admiring visitors, who beheld with astonishment on its reverse the announcement of his performance at a fair, admission a single _soldo_--in English currency, a halfpenny. With such an instance