Am I treading on any one’s toes, disturbing any one’s prejudices, predilections, or pre-formed opinions, in asseverating that the interior of Mr. Lumley’s establishment offers, with one exception, the most magnificent _coup-d’-œil_ of any Opera in Europe that I have seen? Mark the cunning qualification! I say, _that I have seen_; for they tell me that there is an Opera at Barcelona (which nutty sea-port I have never visited), a theatre surpassing in grandeur, and richness of decoration, all the lyric temples of the continent or of these isles; and so far as mere _size_ is concerned, the palm must, I believe, be yielded to Parma, in which caseous Italian city there exists—yet unexplored by me—a huge tumble-down, ruinous, leaky, mildewed _salle_, which is as the Tower of Babel of Opera-houses the Great Bonassus of theatres. I speak of the houses which these weak eyes, in the course of many years’ wandering, have surveyed, through powerful-lensed lorgnettes. Give me her Majesty’s. Above the dreary Scala, with its naked tiers above tiers, its _sediti chuisi_, and the three reserved front rows of the pit, where the authorities were compelled to put the white-blanketed Austrian officers, lest they should come to blows (they often squabbled in the lobbies even) with the spiteful Milanese; the ghastly, dingy, ill-lighted Scala—(it is bigger by far than her Majesty’s, though)—with its rabbit-hutch-like private boxes, whose doors are scrawled over with the penny plain and twopence coloured-like coats of arms of the effete and decadent Lombardian nobility. Above the boasted Grand Opera at Paris, tawdry, inconvenient, and chopped up into unreasonable sections. Above the Burg Theater, at Vienna; the Theatre de la Monnaie, at Brussels. Above, even, the superb little Opernhaus, at Berlin, which, though a gem in its way, is but as a diamond _aigrette_ to the Koh-i-noor. Above the late Royal Italian Opera House, in Bow Street, Covent Garden, London, which was simply a big theatre, ill-built, and undecorated. For the solitary exception I have hinted at you must go north, very far north into Europe, and in the city of Moscow, in the empire of Holy Russia, you shall find an Italian Opera House unprecedented, I verily believe, for size, for splendour, for comfort, for elegance, and for taste. It was not my fortune to be present in Moscow on the occasion of the coronation _fêtes_, when the theatre I speak of was opened to the public preparatory to the regular winter season; but for a description of its glories I must refer those curious in operatic matters to my friend Mr. Henry Sutherland Edwards, who was resident many months in the city of the Kremlin, and whom I sincerely wish I could persuade to do, in better part, for Moscow the holy that which I have myself endeavoured, according to my lights, to do for St. Petersburg the mundane.