Wieland’s last devil, in an opera bearing his fearful name, is not altogether so dainty a fellow as his elder brother of the Danube, whose melancholy so endeared him to our sympathies, whose lackadaisical demeanour so won upon our human weakness. In _The Devil’s Opera_ the hero is more of the pantomimist than of the thinking creature; he is not contemplative, but all for action; he does not, like the former fiend, retire into the fastness of his infernal mind to brood on love and fate, but is incessantly grinning, leaping, tumbling; hence he is less interesting to the meditative part of the audience, though, possibly, more attractive to the majority of playgoers, who seem to take the “evil principle” under their peculiar patronage, laughing, shouting, and hurrahing at every scurvy trick played by it on poor, undefended humanity; though, with a bold aim of genius on the part of the author, the devil, in the opera, is made the ally of love and virtue against blind tyranny and silly superstition. The devil is changed, bound, the bond-slave of the good and respectable part of the _dramatis personae_, to the confusion of the foolish and the wicked. This is certainly putting the “evil principle” to the very first advantage. The best triumph of the highest benevolence is, undoubtedly, to turn the dominating fiend into the toiling vassal, and in the new opera this glory is most unequivocally achieved. To Wieland we are greatly indebted for having reformed the “infernal powers” of the theatre; for having rescued the imp of the stage from the vulgar commonplace character in which he has too long distinguished himself, or, I ought rather to say, exposed himself; for there was no mystery whatever in him: he was a sign-post devil, a miserable daub, with not one of those emanations of profound, unearthly thought—not the slightest approach to that delicacy of colouring, that softening of light into shade, and shade into light, that distinguish the devil of Wieland. No: in him we have the foul fiend divested of all his vulgar, Bartlemy Fair attributes; his horns, and tail, and saucer-eyes, and fish-hook nails, are the least part of him; they are the mere accidents of his nature, not his nature itself; we have the devil in the abstract, and are compelled to receive with some consideration the popular and charitable proverb that declares him to be not quite so black as limners have shadowed him.