far as Lucia is concerned the story is at an end, he reappears in an appropriate cemetery to celebrate, in a lyrical lament, the virtues of his demented love; to be informed by a chorus of retainers that she has not only lost her reason, but has departed altogether from this world; and finally to stab himself while still singing the praises of his "_bell' alma adorata_." When the Lucia of the evening is Patti, Nilsson, or Albani, and the Edgardo is no one in particular, the final scene of course falls flat; no one, indeed, stops to hear it. But the case was quite different when the part of Edgardo was filled by a great dramatic vocalist, like Duprez, or in later days by Mario. In 1835 Donizetti visited Paris, and there brought out his _Marino Faliero_, remembered for a time by several pretty pieces, including, in particular, the opening chorus for the workmen in the arsenal, and a chorus of gondoliers at the beginning of the second act. He was more successful when revisiting the French capital, in 1840, he produced there his opera of _I Martiri_, founded on the subject of _Polyeucte_ which, composed for Naples with a view to Nourrit in the principal part, had been objected to by the Neapolitan censorship; _La Fille du Régiment_, written for and performed at the Opéra Comique; and _La Favorite_ composed in the first instance for a house of the second rank, the Théâtre de la Renaissance, but afterwards transferred to the Académie. _La Favorite_--or _La Favorita_, as it became after passing from the French to the Italian stage--has, like _Lucrezia Borgia_, the advantage of being founded on a highly dramatic story. It is based on a French drama known, until the opera caused it to be forgotten, as _Le Comte de Comminges_; and it seems to owe its origin to a Spanish work. In _La Favorita_, as in most Spanish plays, there is no unfolding of the plot through introductory narrative. The action, from the beginning, takes place beneath the eyes of the spectator. A young man, already tired of the world, is seeking repose in the seclusion of a monastery. But he has been troubled by a vision. The vision still haunts him, and the prior vainly exhorts him in a duet to abandon all thought of the external, and to concentrate his attention on the inward and spiritual. Fernando's adventures with the beautiful lady who turns out to be the "favourite" of the king, the recompense bestowed upon him in the shape of this lady's hand for the valour he has shown in the king's service, and his ultimate return to the monastery when he finds how bitterly he has been deceived, need not here be recounted. It is worth observing, however, that the success of the opera has been in a great measure due to the excellence of the libretto; and that in all really good libretti, as in that of _La Favorita_, the action of the piece, instead of being related, is presented continuously on the stage. The duet of the first act for Fernando and the chief of the monastery is sufficiently