Presently the recitative of the clerk is succeeded by a contest in chantingprobably for the championshipby two rival choruses of shrill-voiced boys, who hurl alternate verses of the Psalms at one another with the fiercest intensity.

The music was not sold with the song, and it was rather difficulta mournful sort of recitative with sudden shifts into marching rhythmand so the people sang the words over and over with her until they had almost learned the tune.

We can never thank her sufficiently for cutting out endless pages of songs and recitative by the melancholious old Hermit who, in the original version, was to commence the opera, and wander in and out of it incessantly.

Her father, who is a stranger to her, comes on dressed in banknotes and chained to a safe; her mother, also a stranger, wears a society bee which buzzes in the place where her bonnet would have been; and five samples of the fashionable world, where, as you know, everybody thinks the same thing at the same time, let off recitatives from time to time in unison.

The composer, of course, wastes no music upon her; flinging to her only an occasional recitative in two notes, but always ending in a reef of a scale, trill, or roulade, for her to wreck her voice on before the audience.

Yet in his time poetry was recitatived to music.