fashionable opera goers that we poor Englishers cannot learn to pronounce
Italian.

But, after all, do we, by employing only _foreigners_--for we are not
particular, so they be foreigners, as to whether they were born and bred
beyond, or on this side the Alps,--do we, by employing only foreigners,
secure this essential purity of Italian pronunciation? Will these
super-delicate critics favour a plain man, by informing me which of the
great singers I have heard for the last thirty years I should select as my
canon of true Italian pronunciation--Catalani and Camporese, or Garcia the
Spaniard and Begrez the Fleming? There is not more difference between the
English, whether we look to phraseology or pronunciation, of a Londoner, a
Gloucestershire man, or a Northumbrian, than there is between the Italian
of a Tuscan, a Venetian and a Neapolitan. Have the stage lamps of Drury
Lane or Covent Garden the virtue of curing the Northumbrian's burr, or
correcting the Gloucestershireman's invincible abhorrence of _h_'s and
_w_'s? If not, can we expect that even the theatres of Rome and Florence
will neutralize at once the provincial accent of a Neapolitan or Venetian?
Was it in Morelli, the stable-boy, or Banti, the street
ballad-singer, that the beau ideal of pure Italian pronunciation was to be
recognised?

But, to be serious. I will venture to affirm that, on this side the Alps,
there is no country in Europe whose natives have so little to learn, or to
unlearn, in acquiring a good Italian pronunciation, as the English. We
have neither the gutturals of the German and the Spaniard, nor the mute
vowels and nasal _n_'s of the French to get rid of; there is scarcely a
sound in the Italian language which we are not in the daily habit of
uttering, and nearly our whole task would be confined to the learning that
certain conventional alphabetical symbols, which represent one sound in