There is lately come to town, at least within these latter years, an Italian gentleman by the name of Verdi, to whose brassy screeds, and tinkling cymbalics, it is expected that all _habitués_ of the opera must listen, to the utter exclusion and oblivion of the old musical worthies who delighted the world with their immortal works before Signor Verdi was born. I have brought you to her Majesty’s Theatre, and this is unfortunately a Verdi night. You may listen to him, but I won’t. Thersites Theorbo, the editor of the “Spinet” (with which is incorporated that famous musical journal the “Jew’s Harp”), may accuse me of being “perfunctory,” or of being an ass—no one minds Thersites Theorbo, knowing him to be a good fellow, much bemused in Cavendish tobacco and counterpoint; but I will shut my eyes, and muse upon the bygone glories of the opera. The place is a mass of memories. Things and books, and scenes and men, and stories, come teeming on my brain as I sit in my stall, heedless of Signor Verdi and his musical machinations. From that shelf, well known to me, where nestle my dog’s-eared Rabelais, my Montaigne, my annotated edition of Captain Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, my Shakspeare, and my beloved Jeremy Taylor, I take down garrulous old Pepys, and read—“Jan. 12, 1667. With my Lord Brouncker to his house, there to hear some Italian Musique, and here we met Tom Killigrew, Sir Robert Murray, and the Italian Signor Baptista, who had prepared a play for the Opera, which Sir T. Killigrew do intend to have up; and here he did sing one of the acts. He is himself the poet as well as the musician, and did sing the whole from the words without any musique prick’d, and played all along on a harpiscon most admirably, and the composition most excellent.” And then I mind me of an advertisement in the “London Gazette,” in 1692, setting forth how “the Italian lady that is lately come over, that is so famous for singing, will sing at the concerts at York Buildings during the season.” The season! There was a “season” in William the Deliverer’s time, then. So I call to mind Dick Steele’s serio-comic announcement in the fourth number of the “Tattler,” of how “Letters from the Haymarket inform us that on Saturday night last the opera of ‘Pyrrhus and Demetrius’ was performed with great applause.” Then from the beginning of Italian opera in England, a grand trunk line extending to our days, I shunt off on to innumerable little branches and loop-lines. I see the Faustina and the Cuzzoni coming to blows—Sir Robert Walpole backing the first, his lady the second. I am, for the nonce, an ardent partisan of Mrs. Tofts. Then I have a vision of Mrs. Fox Lane, in a hoop of preternatural size, bidding General Crewe get out of her house, because he professed his ignorance as to whom Signora Mingotti was—the Mingotti who told Dr. Burney that she had “been frequently hissed by the English for having a toothache, a cold, or a fever, to which the