Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 64, No. 397, November 1848Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 64, No. 397, November 1848
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
and topography of the country in which his scene is laid. He has
got a few names of places, which he jumbles together in the most
diverting manner. His hero, Cyprian de Mayran, a Paris exquisite of
the first water, saddened by a domestic calamity, comes to London
in quest of dissipation and oblivion. He has some acquaintances
there, dating from a previous visit, and amongst them is the popular
singer Sidora W----, a lady, we are told, "whose talent would have
been very contestable at Paris, but was venerated in London, the
city of universal toleration. When, in Norma, or Fidelio, she kept
only tolerably near to the intentions of the composers, changing
their notes into false coin, a phalanx of admirers rose like one
man, and a triple round of applause rent thirty pair of yellow
gloves. The name of Sidora W---- had _great attraction_, (the italics
are M. Méry's,) and when displayed on gigantic placards, before
_Mansion-house_, or _Post-office_, as well as on the modest gray
circulars of the grocers, at night whole squadrons of noble equipages
were seen manoeuvring between _Long Acre_ and the peristyle of
_Covent Garden_, and the theatre of _Drury Lane_ was invaded." The
nightingale who thus, in 1845, filled to suffocation the walls of
Drury, (a fact Mr Bunn may have difficulty to remember,) had a rural
retreat at Highgate, where she received a motley company. "The
garden of reception was like a vast flower-basket inhabited by a
woman, and surrounded by a dark fringe of mute adorers. There were
all the faces of the English universe: retired Calcutta nabobs;
ex-governors of unknown Archipelagos; colonels whose defunct wives
were Malabar widows, snatched from the funeral pile of their
Indian spouses; admirals bronzed by twenty cruises under the
equator; nephews of Tippoo Saib; disgraced ministers from Lahore;
ex-criminals from Botany Bay, who, having grown rich, were voted
virtuous; princes of Madagascar and Borneo; citizens of New Holland,
(naturalised Englishmen, notwithstanding their close affinity to
orang-outangs,)--in short all the human or inhuman types that Sem,
Cham, and Japhet invented on their escape from the Ark, to amuse
themselves a little after a year's diluvian captivity on the summit
of Mount Ararat. It is only in London such collections are to be met
with; and the foreign naturalist has the gratuitous enjoyment of
them. The capital of England is sometimes generous and disinterested
in its zoological exhibitions."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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