dress, he does not respond to the action. She whispers to him with a
rather coarse epithet: 'Why don't you take it? Do you want it buttered?'
All this time, the audience, ignorant of the by-play, was solely intent
on the pathetic situation." This is but one of many instances which
could be adduced from the annals of the stage showing how the exhibition
of the greatest dramatic passion is consistent with the existence of a
jocose, almost cynical, humor on the part of the actors.


III.

In the following year (1833), Mme. Schröder-Devrient sang under Mr.
Bunn at the Covent Garden Theatre, appearing in several of Weber's and
Mozart's masterpieces. She was becoming more and more of a favorite with
the English public. The next season she devoted herself again to
the stage of Germany, where she was on the whole best understood and
appreciated, her faults more uniformly ignored. She appeared in twelve
operas by native composers in Berlin, and thence went to Vienna and St.
Petersburg. She proceeded to Italy in 1835, where she sang for eighteen
months in the principal cities and theatres of that country, and
succeeded in evoking from the critical Italians as warm a welcome as
she had commanded elsewhere. In one city the people were so enthusiastic
that they unharnessed her horses, and drew her carriage home from the
theatre after her closing performance. Although she never entirely
mastered the Italian school, she yet displayed so much intelligence,
knowledge, and faculty in her art-work, that all catholic lovers of
music recognized her great talents. She appeared again in Vienna in
1836, with Mme. Tadolini, Genaro, and Galli, singing in "L'Elisir
d'Amore," and works of a similar cast, operas unsuited, one would think,
to the peculiar _cachet_ of her genius, but her ability in comic and