as well as he can.  This is not all; there are actors who will not appear immediately treading the boards of the stage; they must first be seen in a cloud, or they must descend the lofty stairs of a palace, in order to give more effect to their entree.  When the air is finished, whatever may be the violent or affecting situation of his character, the singer must bow to the audience in acknowledgment of their applause.  The other day, in Semiramis, after the spectre of Ninus had sung his air, the representative of this shadowy personage made in his ghostly costume a low reverence to the pit, which greatly diminished the terror of the apparition.

“They are accustomed in Italy to consider the theatre merely as a large assembly room, where there is nothing to hear but the airs, and the ballet!  I am justified in saying that they listen to nothing but the ballet; for it is only when the ballet is about to begin, that silence is called for in the pit:  and what is this ballet but a masterpiece of bad taste?  There is nothing amusing in the dancing save the comic part of it; the grotesque figures alone afford entertainment, being indeed a good specimen of caricature.  I have seen Gengis-Kan in a ballet, all covered with ermine, and full of fine sentiments; for he ceded his crown to the child of a king whom he had conquered, and lifted him up in the air upon one foot; a new mode of establishing a monarch upon his throne.  I have also seen the sacrifice of Curtius formed into a ballet of three acts, with divertisements.  Curtius, in the dress of an Arcadian shepherd, danced for a considerable time with his mistress; then mounting a real horse in the middle of the stage, he plunged into the gulf of fire, made of yellow satin and gilt paper, which looked more like a fancy riding habit than an abyss.  In fact, I have seen the whole of Roman history from Romulus to Caesar, compressed into a ballet.”

“What you say is true,” replied Prince Castel-Forte, mildly; “but you have only spoken of music and dancing, which do not comprise what we understand by the drama of any country.”  “It is much worse,” interrupted the Count d’Erfeuil, “when tragedies are represented, or dramas that are not termed dramas that end happily:  they unite more horrors in the course of five acts, than the imagination could form a picture of.  In one piece of this kind, the lover kills the brother of his mistress in the second act; in the third he blows out the brains of his mistress herself upon the stage; her funeral occupies the fourth; in the interval, between the fourth and fifth acts, the actor who performs the lover comes forward, and announces to the audience with the greatest tranquillity in the world, the harlequinades which are to be performed on the following evening; he then reappears in the fifth act, to shoot himself with a pistol.  The tragic actors are quite in harmony with the coldness and extravagance of these pieces:  they commit