Who shall deny that Signor Palmo, though his fortunes went down in disaster, made a valuable contribution to that movement--which must still be looked upon as in an experimental stage--which has for its aim the permanent establishment of opera in the United States? Experimental in its nature the movement must remain until the vernacular becomes the language of the performances and native talent provides both works and interpreters. The day is still far distant, but it will come. The opera of Germany was still Italian more than a century and a half after the invention of the art form, though in the meanwhile the country had produced a Bach and a Handel. The Palmo venture (at the bottom of which there seems to have been a desire to popularize or democratize a form of entertainment which has ever been the possession of wealth and fashion) revived the social sentiment upon which Da Ponte had built his hopes. In the opinion of the upper classes's it was not Italian opera that had succumbed, but only the building which housed it. This certainly presented an aspect of incongruity. Fine talent came from England for the English companies, whose career continued without interruption, and the moment which saw the downfall of Palmo's enterprise saw also the influx of a company of Italian artists under the management of Don Francesco Marty y Torrens, of Havana, who deserves to be kept in the minds of opera lovers which go back to the days of the Academy of Music, if for no other reason than that he brought Signor Arditi to New York--the hawk-billed conductor whose shining pate used to glisten like a stage lamp from the conductor's seat in the fine old house at Fourteenth Street and Irving Place.