he orchestra, turned to the audience and calmly clapped his
hands. The anger at this openly-expressed contempt for public opinion
did not prevent the opera from gradually gaining ground, until by the
end of the week it was a marked success. Had it been a failure, the
composer would have borne it easily: Mr. Edwards informs us that when
Rossini's _Sigismondo_ was violently hissed at Venice he sent a letter
to his mother with a picture of a large _fiasco_ (bottle). His _Torvaldo
e Dorliska_, which was brought out soon afterward, was also hissed, but
not so much. This time Rossini sent his mother a picture of a
_fiaschetto_ (little bottle).

Nor is it, in modern times, authors or actors alone who are subject to
the hiss. The orator may provoke it by a bold speech in support of an
unpopular measure or an unpopular man. But here the hisser is not so
safe, nor the hissee--to coin a convenient word--so defenceless. The
orator is not hampered by the studied words of a written part: he has
the right of free speech, and he may retort upon his sibilant
surrounders. Macready records that on one occasion, when Sheil was
hissed, he "extorted the applause of his assailants by observing to
them, 'You may hiss, but you cannot sting.'" Even finer was the retort
of Coleridge under similar circumstances: "When a cold stream of truth
is poured on red-hot prejudices, no wonder they hiss."

Sir William Knighton declares that George II. never entered a theatre
save in fear and trembling from dread of hearing a single hiss, which,
though it were at once drowned in tumultuous applause, he would lie
awake all night thinking about, entirely forgetful of the enthusiasm it
had evoked. He must have felt as Charles Lamb did, who wrote: "A hundred
hisses (hang the word! I write it like kisses--how different!)--a
hundred hisses outweigh a thousand claps. The former come more directly
from the heart." It is hard to entirely agree with Lamb here. Hissing
seems to me to proceed for the most part from ill-temper, or at least
from the dissatisfaction of the head. Applause is often the outburst of
the heart, the gush of a feeling, an enthusiasm incapable of restraint.
No wonder that the retired actor longs for a sniff of the footlights and
for the echo of the reverberating plaudits to the accompaniment of which
he formerly bowed himself off.

Indeed, applause is the breath of an actor's nostrils. Without it good
acting is almost impossible. Actors, like oth