as it was presented at Covent Garden, it cannot be said to have been really successful. The pavilion had no other hint of a fatal spell than that which the lowered lights could suggest; the Court of Armide, who was surely twin-sister to “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” might have been made to evoke some vision akin to that which Keats saw of “pale kings and princes too, pale warriors, death-pale were they all.” But, perhaps largely owing to the faulty lighting, it was a rather garish spectacle, a noisy conflict of pure reds, greens and blues. Only for a moment did the scene really live,--when the mists began to wash round the battlements, the colours fused together in a trembling twilight, the tumult of the action died away and the motionless figures gazed after the victim traveller led away by his fatal lover. But doubtless the composers of the ballet do not claim for it any special seriousness of intention. We are to take it or leave it as a simple _ballet d’action_ of the conventional school, no more than a groundwork for some very brilliant and elaborate dancing. It is only a failure when judged by canons which we should not think of applying to any ballet but that of M. Diaghilew. The theme of _Le Carnaval_ may be regarded as even more flippant, but it expresses a series of purely musical ideas, and moreover it shows how the ballet can be made as witty as dialogue. It is an adaptation by M. Fokine of Schumann’s well-known pianoforte solo. Hardly a note has been added to Schumann’s music or taken away from it by the four composers who have skilfully provided the instrumentation--Rimsky-Korsakov, Liadov, Glazounov and Tcherepnin. Not only has Schumann’s work lost nothing of its original savour, but rather it has gained in expression and brilliance. In this fantasy, beloved of pianists, Schumann sought to represent various personages whom the ballet presents to us in material form. The composer’s explanation of the work was given to Moscheles, to whom he wrote: “The _Carnaval_ was written mostly for different occasions, and, excepting three or four of the pieces, is all founded on the notes A. S. (A flat), C. H (B natural), which form the name of a little town in Bohemia where I had a musical friend, and which, curiously enough, are also the only musical letters in my name. I wrote the titles later.... As a whole, the work has absolutely no artistic merit; but individually the various states of feeling seem to me interesting.” The pieces are written round a number of imagined characters--Arlequin, Columbine, Estrella, Chiarina, Pierrot, Pantalon, Papillon, Florestan, Eusebius. The Chiarina was supposed to be Madame Schumann, the Estrella, as Schumann told Moscheles, “a name such as one writes under portraits to impress the picture on the mind,” and in Florestan and Eusebius he represented himself.