The Opera, too, is nightly becoming more crowded; while at the two patent theatres "a beggarly account of empty boxes," and an equally beggarly account of flat, stale, and unprofitable performances, greets me whenever I am rash enough to take my post of observation. Lady Romford has a private box, which she visits only in preference to staying at a still duller home, on a disengaged evening; and Bagot occasionally drags me to the play, to make my foreign ignorance and inexperience a pretext for following Lady Clara to a spot which no one seems to visit without an apology. People in society give as many reasons for having done so strange a thing as go to see the new tragedy, as they would invent in Paris to excuse a similar omission. Since the Kemble munia, and the Byron mania, there has been a general affectation of indifference towards poetry and the drama; your true fashionable never mentions either without ridicule--the natural consequence of previously exaggerated enthusiasm. But above all the absurdities connected with this national weakness, stands that of the public prints. So much importance is given by the newspapers to every thing relating to the histrionic art, that we are daily informed of the whereabout of all the third-rate performers of the minor theatres; that "Mr. Smith, of Sadler's Wells, is engaged to Mr. Ducrow for the ensuing season;" or that "Miss Brown, belonging to the ballet department of the Surrey theatre, has sprained her ankle." While two thirds of a leading print are occupied with details of the Reform Bill, or a debate on some constitutional question,--or while the foreign intelligence of two sieges and a battle is concentrated with a degree of terseness worthy a telegraph, half a column is devoted to the plot of a new melo-drama at the Coburg; or to a cut and dried criticism upon the nine hundredth representation of _Hamlet_--beginning with the "immortal bard," and ending with the waistcoats of the grave-digger!--_The Opera, a Novel_. * * * * * EUGENE ARAM. The recollection of this man is still preserved at Lynn, in Norfolk, at which town he was for some time usher at the grammar-school. A small room at the back of the house, in which he slept, was, until these last few years, (when it was pulled down and rebuilt,) mysteriously pointed to by the little urchins as they passed up to bed of a cold, ghost-enticing night, as the chamber in which the "usher, who was hanged for murder," was used to sleep. The tradition which remains of his character is, that he was "a man of loneliness and mystery," sullen and reserved; that on half-holy-days, and when his duties would allow, he strayed solitary and cheerless, as if to avoid the world, amongst the flat uninteresting marshes which are situated on the opposite side of the river Ouse.