And Clarence was easily persuaded to accept the invitation. Talbot was not one of those men who are forced to exert themselves to be entertaining. He had the pleasant and easy way of imparting his great general and curious information, that a man, partly humourist, partly philosopher, who values himself on being a man of letters, and is in spite of himself a man of the world, always ought to possess. Clarence was soon beguiled from the remembrance of his mortifications, and, by little and little, entirely yielded to the airy and happy flow of Talbot's conversation. In the evening, three or four men of literary eminence (as many as Talbot's small Tusculum would accommodate with beds) arrived, and in a conversation, free alike from the jargon of pedants and the insipidities of fashion, the night fled away swiftly and happily, even to the lover. CHAPTER XXXVIII. We are here (in the country) among the vast and noble scenes of Nature; we are there (in the town) among the pitiful shifts of policy. We walk here in the light and open ways of the divine bounty,--we grope therein the dark and confused labyrinths of human malice; our senses are here feasted with all the clear and genuine taste of their objects, which are all sophisticated there, and for the most part overwhelmed with their contraries: here pleasure, methinks, looks like a beautiful, constant, and modest wife; it is there an impudent, fickle, and painted harlot.--COWLEY. Draw up the curtain! The scene is the Opera. The pit is crowded; the connoisseurs in the front row are in a very ill humour. It must be confessed that extreme heat is a little trying to the temper of a critic. The Opera then was not what it is now, nor even what it had been in a former time. It is somewhat amusing to find Goldsmith questioning, in one of his essays, whether the Opera could ever become popular in England. But on the night--on which the reader is summoned to that "theatre of sweet sounds" a celebrated singer from the Continent made his first appearance in London, and all the world thronged to "that odious Opera-house" to hear, or to say they had heard, the famous Sopraniello. With a nervous step, Clarence proceeded to Lady Westborough's box; and it was many minutes that he lingered by the door before he summoned courage to obtain admission.