ry piece, to be sure! I could not help looking at the
full house and wondering how so many decent Englishmen and women
could sit through such a spectacle.... The impression made upon me
by the subject of Meyerbeer's celebrated opera appears to have
entirely superseded that of the undoubtedly fine music; but I never
was able to enjoy the latter because of the former, and the only
shape in which I ever enjoyed "Robert the Devil" was in M.
Levassor's irresistibly ludicrous account of it in the character of
a young Paris _badaud_, who had just come from seeing it at the
theater. His version of its horrors was laughable in the extreme,
especially when, coming to the episode of the resurrection of the
nuns, he contrived to give the most comical effect of a whole
crowd--gibbering, glissading women greeting one another with the
rapid music of the original scene, to which he adapted the words--

"Quoi c'est moi c'est toi,
Oui c'est toi c'est moi;
Comme nous voila bien degommes."

Mendelssohn's opinion of the subjects chosen for operas in his day
(even such a story as that of the Sonnambula) was scornful in the
extreme.

_Friday, 24th._-- ... Dined with the Fitzhughs, and after dinner
proceeded to the Adelphi, where we went to see "Victorine," which I
liked very much. Mrs. Yates acted admirably the whole of it, but
more particularly that part where she is old and in distress and
degradation. There was a dreary look of uncomplaining misery about
her, an appearance as of habitual want and sorrow and suffering, a
heavy, slow, subdued, broken deportment, and a way of speaking that
was excellent and was what struck me most in her performance, for
the end is sure to be so effective that she shares half her merit
there with the situation. Reeve is funny beyond anything; his face
is the most humorous mask I ever saw in my life. I think him much
more comical than Liston. The carriage was not come at the end of
the first piece, so we had to wait through part of "Robert the
Devil" (given at last, such was its popularity, at every theater in
London). Of course, after our own grand _diablerie_, it did not
strike me except as being wonderfully well done, considering the
size and means of their little stage. [Yates made a most capital
fiend: I shoul