When reviewing, about two years ago, a volume of rambles[5] in a very different region, we stated our opinion as to the style of illustration appropriate to books of this kind, in which cuts or engravings are most acceptable when they explain scenes and objects that written description, even at great length, would less accurately and clearly place before the reader. Mr Smith is evidently of the same way of thinking. "I have given," he says, "only those illustrations which appeared to be the most characteristic rather than the most imposing." In so doing he has shown judgment, and used to the best advantage the pencils and colour-box, which formed part of the heterogeneous contents of his well-stuffed knapsack. The reader will be more obliged to him for the appropriate and useful little sketches that thickly stud his pages, than for any drawings of greater pretensions, whose introduction the size and price of the volume would have permitted.
It is now between three and four years since the town was startled by intelligence that the Opera House was divided against itself, and that melody and grace were about to take flight from the bottom of the Hay-market to the top of the Garden. In our quality of determined foes to unnecessary changes and theoretical reforms, we received the intelligence regretfully, and so, we have reason to believe, did that very considerable section of the London and provincial public into whose annual calculations of refined enjoyments the Italian Opera largely enters. Without going into the merits of the dispute, which up to this hour we have never heard clearly elucidated, we plainly discerned one thing--namely, that there was discord in the operatic camp; that harmony had abandoned its favourite abode; that managers, musicians, singers, and dancers, were drawing different ways: in short, that the Opera, taking the lead in a fashion that soon afterwards became disagreeably prevalent throughout Europe, was in a state of revolution. With whom the fault lay we knew not, and little cared: all that concerned us was the unpleasant fact that the pleasures of the music-loving multitude, _quorum pars sumus_, were seriously endangered. It is pretty notorious that, with very rare exceptions, professional votaries of the Muses are capricious, and difficult to deal with. Painters are accused of unpunctuality and improvidence; composers are often idle dogs, fretting _impresarios_ into fevers, as Rossini did Barbaja, and fulfilling their engagements only at the last minute of the eleventh hour, with the _polenta_ smoking on the table;[6] even authors we have heard declared, upon no mean authority, to be queer cattle to guide; but, of all classes whose occupation derives from art and poetry, none, assuredly, are harder to manage and to please than actors and musicians. From those early days of Opera, when a Lully shivered Cremonas upon the heads of a refractory orchestra, to the recent ones when a Lumley in vain essayed to appease the petulance of a prima donna, and calm the choler of a conductor, the tribulations of managers have been countless as the pebbles on the shore. To judge, indeed, from their own account, few of the penalties so picturesquely set forth in Fox's martyr-book, but would be preferable to ten years' management of a large lyric theatre. Consult the comedians, and we are presented with the reverse of the medal. A manager, we shall be told, is a covetous and Heliogabalian tyrant, fattening upon the toil and talents of the artist; a sort of vampire in a black coat, sucking the blood of genius, faring sumptuously on the proceeds of a tenor, squeezing the cost of his stud out of a soprano, and making large annual investments on the strength of an underpaid barytone. These things may be true, but we shall more readily credit them when we less frequently see managers in the _Gazette_, and when we hear of singers putting down their carriages, retrenching their suburban villas, and contenting themselves with salaries less enormous than those they now unblushingly exact. Upon such matters, however, it is not our purpose to expatiate. Theatrical quarrels rarely excite much general interest in this country, except inasmuch as they may exercise an unfavourable influence on the pleasures of the public--which has not been the case, we are happy to say, in the most recent and important instance of disagreement between the lessee of the first London theatre and certain members of his company.