REASONS FOR NOT HAVING VISITED THE OPERA.
MARCHING on a forlorn hope, is the service next in severity to visiting the King's Theatre in a hard frost, on the first night of its opening. There are critics who, undeterred by the threatening aspect of the bills, will stride up to the breach as soon as it is declared practicable, face the adverse curtain, thread the covert-way, and establish themselves upon the naked and exposed glacis, swept by the tremendous blasts from the flanks of the works. We are not of this desperate order. The fierce spirit which can encounter such hardships, is one unmeet for criticism, 'Who is una ware of the intimate sympathy between the heart and the nose? and that when the latter ceases, to feel, the former shares in the insensibilitg ? The Romans referred critical nicety to the nose ; and when it loses its office of sensibility, and lives only to sneeze, judgment should hold its throne in abeyance. All the amiabilities —and in a:Mobilities the critic should abound—are warm ; and a chilled obssrver has an eye only for faults. Charity is the severest judge on earth, and charity is proverbially cold. In our operatic remembrances, PASTA alone had power to resist a hard frost ; and we perfectly recollect one frightfully severe night of the Medea, when the audience, instead of weeping tears as is customary, snowed at the eyes. The lady sitting in a box over us, shed prodigiously large flakes, and almost smothered us in the drift, swept together ty a tornado of sighs that would have cut an Esquimaux in two. One gentleman, in the vehemence of sympathy, shed hail somewhat larger than peas. Being aware of a little infirmity in ourselves, and that our feelings, like madeira, do not bear ice, we have resolved never to sit in judgment when the glass is below twenty-six. The Donna del Lugo was not an opera calculated to make usbrea.k this excellent resolution. Scotland was too cold for the season ; and the very thought of a Lady of a Lake made one shiver. We should have preferred Cinderella;—a character giving one a pleasing idea of the fireside ; and contact with the grate, we all know, makes an Englishman's happiness. Hence are wintry first nislits of the opera unprized, because the high and mighty condescend not to be frozen.
All men are not so wise and prudent as ourselves,—it would be strange if they were so indeed ; and mark the consequences. One of our contemporaries, an able-eared man too, who went on the desperate duty of the first night, sat, as the sailors say, " till all was blue ;" and when he came away, his hand was so frozen that he could not for the life of him turn a single fair compliment ! Instead of penning, he was in the Greenland Seas harpooning poor PISARONI, to such a degree that the Globe and Morning Journal of the next day exclaimed against the truculency. It was however merely owing to the frost ; and if we—even we—had assisted under those congealing circumstances, the consequences might have been as discreditable to our admired temper. Critics, like other flesh, are unfit for use while the frost possesses them ; and establishments which send their dilettanti on such nights as the 31st ult., should take care to put them for two or three hours in cold water (the best mode of thawing) on' their return; and they should by no means be intrusted with pens when their paws are not competent to the management of skewers. " Speaking daggers " is a common phrase, and there is as culpable a practice of writing snowballs—one of which has hit PISARONI a cruel blow on the mouth.
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