She remembered, too, how Lushington and Mrs. Rushmore had warned her and entreated her not to become an opera-singer.

The career of a great opera-singer is rarely more than half as long as that of a great tragedian, and even when a primadonna or a tenor makes a fortune, the decline of their glory is far more sudden and sad than that of actors generally is.

Sometimes he asked himself: "What would my dear prudential mother say, to see me leaving my business to agents and clerks, while I devote my life to the service of an opera-singer?an opera-singer, too, who has twice been on the verge of being sold as a slave, and who has been the victim of a sham marriage!"

It was familiar to her son; but he listened to it with quickened interest, while he gazed at the beautiful opera-singer winding about so gracefully in the evolutions of the dance.

" "That opera-singer seems to have turned your head, though she is old enough to be your mother," rejoined Mr. Bell.

It was that which gave me strength to work so hard for musical distinction; and that motive stimulated me to appear as an opera-singer, though the publicity was distasteful to me.

But the French opera-singers were a courtly race.

The French opera had been established a century before as a Royal Academy of Music by Louis XIV., who had issued letters patent which declared the profession of an opera-singer one that might be followed even by a nobleman; and it seemed, therefore, quite consistent with the rank thus conferred on them that they should take the lead in paying loyal compliments to their princes.

When I was in Italy, Antonelli, an opera-singer, was the favourite of the Neapolitan public.

In the space of about half-an-hour, he handed the manuscript of the "Marseillaise" to an opera-singer whom he adored, she took it away and sang it at the Opera, it caught the popular ear from that one performance, and the dying Rouget heard it sung by the passing multitude in the streets within about fifteen minutes of the moment when it first left his hands.

And if an old heathen, two thousand years ago, discoursed thus gravely of the romantic part of our nature, whence comes it that in Christian lands we think in so pagan a way of it, and turn the whole care of it to ballad-makers, romancers, and opera-singers?