I am not aware whether any of my present generation of readers—people are born, and live and die, so fast now-a-days—remember a friend of mine who dwelt in an out-of-the-way place called Tatty-boy’s Rents, and whom I introduced to the public by the name of Fripanelli. He was a music-master—very old, and poor, and ugly; almost a dwarf in stature, wrinkled, decrepit; he wore a short cloak, and the boys called him “Jocko;” indeed, he was not at all unlike a baboon in general appearance. But Fripanelli in his time—a very long time ago—though now brought to living in a back slum, and teaching the daughters of chandlers’ shopkeepers, had been a famous professor of the tuneful art. He knew old Gaddi—Queen Caroline’s Gaddi—well: he had been judged worthy to preside at the pianoforte at Velluti’s musical classes; and he had even written the music to a ballet, which was performed with great _éclat_ at the King’s Theatre, and in which the celebrated Gambalonga had danced. To me, Frip. had an additional claim to be regarded with something like curiosity mingled with reverence; for he had positively been, in the halcyon days of youth, the manager of an Italian opera company, the place of whose performance was—wherever do you think?—the Pantheon, in Oxford Street. Now, as I stand in the lively bazaar, with the prattling little children, and the fine flounced ladies, I try to conjure back the days when Fripanelli was young, and when the Pantheon was a theatre. From here in the vestibule—where the ornamented flower-pots, and the garden-chairs of complicated construction, and the busts with smoky cheeks and noses, and marvellously clubbed heads of hair, have their _locus standi_—from here sprang the grand staircase. There was no Haydon’s picture of Lazarus for our grandfathers and grandmothers in hoops and powder—you must remember that Fripanelli looks at least two hundred and fifty years of age, and is currently reported to be ninety—to stare at as they trotted up the degrees. Yonder, in the haven of bygone mediocrities in the picture-gallery, may have been the crush-room; the rotunda at the back of the bazaar, where now the vases of wax-flowers glimmer in a perpetual twilight, must have been the green-room; the conservatories were dressing-rooms, and the stage door was undoubtedly in Great Marlborough Street. How I should have liked to witness the old pigtail operas and ballets performed at the Pantheon, when Fripanelli and the century were young. “Iphigenia in Aulis,” “Ariadne in Naxos,” “Orestes and Pylades,” “Daphnis and Chloë,” “Bellerophon,” “Eurydice,” the “Clemency of Titus,” the “Misfortunes of Darius,” and the “Cruelty of Nero”—these were the lively subjects which our grandfathers and grandmothers delighted to have set to Italian music. Plenty of good heavy choruses, tinkle-tankling instrumental music, plaintive ditties, with accompaniments on the fife and the fiddle, and lengthy screeds of droning recitatives, like the