“No: once in three weeks sufficed; and the time selected was either a Tuesday or a Saturday night, my reason for which was this—Tuesday and Saturday were for many years the regular nights of performance at the opera house, and there in those times Grassini sang, and her voice was delightful to me beyond all that I had ever heard. Thrilling was the pleasure with which almost always I heard her. Shivering with expectation I sat, when the time drew near for her golden epiphany, shivering I rose from my seat, incapable of rest, when that heavenly and harp-like voice sang its own victorious welcome in its prelusive _threttanelo—threttanelo_. The choruses were divine to hear; and, when Grassini appeared in some interlude, as she often did, and poured forth her passionate soul as Andromache at the tomb of Hector, &c., I question whether any Turk, of all that ever entered the paradise of opium-eaters, can have had half the pleasure I had. But, indeed, I honour the barbarians too much, by supposing them capable of any pleasures approaching to the intellectual ones of an Englishman. A chorus of elaborate harmony displayed before me, as in a piece of arras work, the whole of my past life—not as if recalled by an act of memory, but as if present, and incarnated in the music; no longer painful to dwell upon, but the detail of its incidents removed, or blended in some hazy abstraction, and its passions exalted, spiritualized, and sublimed. And over and above the music of the stage and the orchestra I had all around me, in the intervals of the performances, the music of the Italian language talked by Italian women—for the gallery was usually crowded with Italians—and I listened with a pleasure, such as that with which Weld, the traveller, lay and listened in Canada, to the sweet laughter of Indian women; for the less you understand a language, the more sensible you are to the melody or harshness of its sounds.” Let the reader who seeks to know of his other Saturday evenings’ experiences, wandering about in the market-places, and threading the intricate mazes of bye-lanes and alleys, seek it in his “Confessions.”