And the white-haired Saxons came in shoals to the studio to see the painting with thirty years' labor on it, and accordingly as their oracles had judged it, so did they: for behold! gay colors are tabooed in the mythology of the Pokerites, and are classed with perfumes, dance-music, and jollity, and art earns a precarious livelihood in their land, where all knowledge of it is supposed to be tied up with the enjoyers of primogeniture. ROMAN THEATRES. The Apollo, where grand opera, sandwiched with moral ballets, is given for the benefit of foreigners, principally, would be a fine house if you could only see it; but when Caper was in Rome, the oil-lamps, showing you where to sit down, did not reveal its proportions, or the dresses of the box-beauties, to any advantage; and as oil-lamps will smoke, there settled a veil over the theatre towards the second act, that draped Comedy like Tragedy, and then set her to coughing. During Carnival a melancholy ball or two was given there: a few wild foreigners venturing in masked, believed they had mistaken the house, for although many women were wandering around in domino, they found the Roman young men unmasked, walking about dressed in canes and those dress-coats, familiarly known as tail-coats, which cause a man to look like a swallow with the legs of a crane, and wearing on their impassive faces the appearance of men waiting for an oyster-supper--or an earthquake. The commissionaire at the hotel always recommends strangers to go to the Apollo: 'I will git you loge, sare, first tier--more noble, sare.' The Capranica Theatre is next in size and importance; it is beyond the Pantheon, out of the foreign quarter of Rome, and you will find in it a Roman audience--to a limited extent. Salvini acted there in _Othello_, and filled the character admirably; it is needless to say that Iago received even more applause than Othello; Italians know such men profoundly--they are Figaros turned undertakers. Opera was given at the Capranica when the Apollo was closed. The Valle is a small establishment, where Romans, pure blood, of the middle class, and the nobility who did not hang on to foreigners, were to be found. Giuseppina Gassier, who has since sung in America, was prima-donna there, appearing generally in the _Sonnambula_.