And each well earned! The crowd would press and jostle To hear their favourite warbler, from whose throat, Clear as the lark, and mellow as the throstle, The limpid melody would soar and float. Now like a shattered lute, The Nightingale who sang in winter's mute; But long remembered that pure life shall be, To Music dedicate and vowed to Charity. [Illustration: THE LATEST FASHION IN MUSIC AT HOME "By Mendelssohn, is it not, Miss Prigsby?" "We believe so." "One of the 'Songs Without Words'?" "Possibly. We nevah listen to Mendelssohn." "Indeed! You don't admire his music?" "We do not." "May I ask why?" "Because there are no wrong notes in it!" (_Our gallant colonel is "out of it" again._)] [Sidenote: _Jean and Edouard de Reszke_] The idols of the operatic world in _Punch's_ earlier days were mainly Italian or trained in Italy. In the period which we have now reached no single nation retained a monopoly of "stars." Madame Nordica, who appeared in 1890, was an American, Madame Melba was Australian-born of Scottish descent, and the two de Reszkes, Jean and Edouard, the chief glories of many recurrent seasons at Covent Garden, were Poles. A hundred years earlier Lord Mount-Edgcumbe, a famous amateur and critic, declared that the French opera singers were excruciating to listen to. In the late 'eighties and 'nineties the best singing was heard from those who had been trained in Paris. The de Reszkes in particular helped to achieve what _Punch_ had declared to be impossible--they made Wagner popular among the fashionable opera-goers by singing his later works as they had never been sung before, turning to them at the zenith of their powers and reputation, a service to art which more self-protective singers have sedulously avoided. Jean de Reszke was great in _Faust_, _Roméo et Juliette_, _Aïda_, _Le Prophète_, but he was greater as Siegfried and Tristan. And so with his brother Edouard, when his Mephistopheles or his Friar Laurence are compared with his Wotan, his Hagen or his King Marke. I have spoken elsewhere of the disastrous National Opera House scheme of Mapleson and the _fiasco_ of the Royal English Opera House in Shaftesbury Avenue. _Ivanhoe_, Sullivan's solitary excursion into the domain of grand opera, which was written for the opening of the last-named building, did not achieve more than a _succès d'estime_. _Punch's_ notice is friendly but not enthusiastic. When it gave place to the _Basoche_, he summed up the situation facetiously but shrewdly enough under the heading, "English Opera as She isn't sung":--