_Monday_.--_Hamlet_. Music by AMBROISE THOMAS, and _libretto_ by Messieurs CARRÉ and BARBIER, who seem to have read _Hamlet_ once through, after which they wrote down as a _libretto_ what they remembered, of the story. It would be difficult to mention any Opera less dramatic than this. The question arises at once, adapting the immortal phrase of JAMES LE SIFFLEUR, "Why lug in _Hamlet_?" Why not have called it _Ophelia_? Whatever interest there may be in the Opera--and there is very little--is centred entirely in _Ophelia_. The _Ghost_ is utterly purposeless, but of distinguished appearance as a robust spectre, marching in at one gate, and out at another, or hiding behind a sofa, and popping up suddenly, in order to frighten an equally purposeless _Hamlet._ Like father, like son. M. LASSALLE is a fine, substantial, baritonial _Hamlet_, who is always posturing, weeping, calling out _ma mère_, and blubbering on the ample matronly bosom of his mother, Madame RICHARD ("O RICHARD! _O ma Reine_!") like a big, blubbering, overgrown schoolboy. Were I inclined to disquisitionise, I should say that Messieurs CARRÉ and BARBIER have actually realised SHAKSPEARE's own description of his jelly-fleshed hero, whose mind is as shaky as his well-covered body. _Hamlet_ was--as SHAKSPEARE took care to emphasise--"fat, and scant of breath"--which was the physical description of the actor who first impersonated the leading _rôle_ of this play; and the French author's idea of _Hamlet_ was, accordingly, a fat youth, very much out of condition, home from Wittenberg College, in consequence of his father's recent decease. [Illustration: Hamlet is out of it in the last Act. Why wasn't he brought into the Ballet?] Some of the lighter musical portions of the Opera are charming, and the Chorus at the end of Act I, might have been written by OFFENBACH. But what is there of the story? Nothing. The King is not killed: the Queen isn't poisoned: _Polonius_ is not stabbed behind the arras, having been, perhaps, killed before the Opera commenced, since his name appears in the book but not in the programme, and the only person on the stage that I could possibly associate with that dear old Lord Chamberlain was M. MIRANDA, who had donned a white beard and a different robe from what he had been previously wearing as _Horatio_ in the First and Second Acts, in order to enter and lead the King away, in an interpolated and ineffective scene which was not in the book. A very hard-working Opera for the principals, and a thankless task. _Hamlet's_ drinking song fine, and finely sung. But the whole point of the Opera is in the last Act, where there is a _ballet_ that has nothing to do with the piece, but pretty to see little PALLADINO in short white skirts, dancing merrily in a forest glade, among the happy peasantry, to whom comes _Ophelia_, mad as several hatters, and after a lunatic scene, charming, both musically and dramatically, throws herself into the water, and dies singing.