the Arabian Nights Entertainments, or the heathen mythology; and the musick, for which a certain number of lines of certain length have been ordered, condescends, as little as possible, to borrow aid from sense.

The wonders which we read of in the Dunciad are here to be seen in all the perfection of extravagant absurdity. The angel of dulness here plants his standard, and scatters his magick charms in profusion. Monsters and gods, nymphs, shepherdesses and furies, are seen to dance or to fight, as the case requires; it sometimes happens too from the course of the story made use of, that the horrors of the infernal regions are laid open, the damned are even rolling about in flames and sulphur, and over them, at a distance, the mind is consoled with a view of the Elysian fields, very much in the nature of a Mahometan paradise; and this medley of absurdities, ending as Pope says, by

"A fire, a jigg, a battle, and a ball,"

is received with as much applause as the victory of Austerlitz. Racine meanwhile, at the French theatre, hardly commands attention; and Moliere is acted to empty benches, and by the most ordinary actors, and the Comick Opera of former times, in which French musick, if they have any, appears to advantage, is rather declining. It is in

Note.-Lorsqu'on entend, au spectacle, cette musique militaire qui appelle au combat, le spectateur partage l'emotion qu'elle doit causer à ceux qui sont menacès de ne plus se revoir la musique fait ressortir la situation; un art nouveau redouble l'impression qu'un autre art a preparè, et les sons et les paroles ebrantent tour à tour notre imagination, et notre cœur.

Mad. de Stäel, L'Allemagne.

the comick opera alone that the alliance between sound and sense in some measure still exists, and we know how happily allied they have been on some occasions by the united talents of Gretry and Marmontel. The comick opera, so called in opposition to the great opera, of which I have already attempted to give you some idea, is very similar to the ballad opera of the English stage, of which Gay is considered as the inventor, and what is not a little singular, it is said to owe much of its improvement to an English naval officer of the name of Hales, who having consumed his fortune, and perhaps injured his reputation, in some love adventure, had fled from England, and passed the last fifteen or twenty years of his life in Paris. He is known in the annals of French literature by the name of d'Hele.

But to return to the great opera. Musick, even with such aid as it still receives from poetry, and from the interesting fictions of fairy tales, and heathen mythology, seems in danger of sinking under the ascendancy of dancing, all degenerated as the art certainly is; degenerated, I say, for it is no longer the expression of gayety, nor is it the serious dance, the school of the graces. It is what Young calls a tempest of agility, a violent exertion of bodily force, a turning round with velocity, and jumping as high as possible to light upon one leg like those leaden figures of Mercury you see on houses or on walls, and all this is attended with an exposure of the person in the female dancers which admits of no description. It

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does now and then happen indeed, that the composer of an opera, who has to lull to sleep some vigilant monster, or to charm some guardian of a captive beauty, indulges his genius in strains of simple melody, and that the inventor of a ballad wishes to make his dance emblematical of rural happiness, that they both, in short, return to Nature in their several departments, and to genuine taste, and the performance is then delightful. There is a moment in the Mysteries of Isis when the sister arts of musick, poetry, and dancing are thus most happily united; and I was struck with the redoubled attention of the audience. But such moments pass very rapidly, and one soon returns to the usual extravagancies, and to the jumping of Duport and Vestris.* The establishment of the opera costs a large yearly sum, exclusively of the receipts, and this is defrayed by the government, which fixes the salaries of the performers, and allows them a benefit after twenty years service. The exertions of a dancer are generally fatal to health in a few years, and this is said to be particularly the case with the female dancers, who, after a strange variety of fortune and of situation, very often, if they live to be old, take their station, I am told, as beggars at a church door, and die in an hospital. The demand of the establishment, meanwhile, is kept up by a supply from needy parents, who are satisfied that their children should be taught to dance, without any

* If my son does now and then touch the floor in dancing, said the elder Vestris, it is in compassion to those who dance with him,

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other education whatever, and, as a great majority of them can rise no higher than to figurantes, with salaries of not more than thirty pounds per annum, they inevitably become outcasts of society. One cannot surely but lament that the opera, which affords no very rational amusement after all, should be thus converted into a gulf which swallows up so much youth, innocence, and beauty. The principal dancers and singers are supposed to be always at the orders of the court, and are sent for by the emperour, whenever he chooses to relax a little from state affairs; nor does he spare reproaches if they arrive a moment too late, or are less well dressed than he thinks they should be, or do not perform entirely to his satisfaction. "Vous avez chante comme des cochons" was the salutation he received the singers with, when they came to pay their respects to him after his coronation.

The theatre has afforded us a great deal of amusement during our stay here; but I confess myself to have been disappointed at the representation of some of Moliere and Regnard's pieces; not that the acting was deficient, but from a great deal of stage trick which is said to have been handed down by tradition, which is now as powerful on the stage as it ever was in the church. When I observed to a person I once sat next to, at the representation of Regnard's Joueur, that there was nothing in the play, as it was printed, to justify Hector's endeavouring repeatedly to steal money out of his master's hat,, or the ex

treme familiarity which takes place between them, I was answered, that it was always acted in that manner. And when the parterre found fault with Durincourt's squeezing his handkerchief, which was wet with lavender water, into the prompter's seat, he silenced them by stepping forward and observing that Preville had always acted the part in that manner. It was at the theatre I first saw the emperour. But so great a man deserves to be the subject of a separate letter.

LETTER LXXI.

NANTES.

MY DEAR E

You will not be surprised to see my letter dated from Nantes, after what I mentioned to you in my last. We were beginning to like Paris extremely. We had been at several private parties, and were invited to others; but it was necessary to break the spell, and we resolutely did so early in March, and took the road to Orleans in rather bad weather. From Orleans we followed the course of the Loire to Nantes, and have already engaged our passage on board of an American ship at Paimboeuf. I will now return to my journal, and, having my notes before me, it will still be as if I had continued to write to you every day. We were at the play one evening, and seated near the stage, when in consequence of some preparations in the box appropriated to the emperour, it was