when I have seen our Italian performers chattering in the vehemence
of action, that they have been calling us names, and abusing us
among themselves; but I hope, since we put such an entire confidence
in them, they will not talk against us before our faces, though they
may do it with the same safety as if it were behind our backs. In
the meantime, I cannot forbear thinking how naturally an historian
who writes two or three hundred years hence, and does not know the
taste of his wise forefathers, will make the following reflection:
"In the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Italian tongue was
so well understood in England, that operas were acted on the public
stage in that language."

One scarce knows how to be serious in the confutation of an
absurdity that shows itself at the first sight. It does not want
any great measure of sense to see the ridicule of this monstrous
practice; but what makes it the more astonishing, it is not the
taste of the rabble, but of persons of the greatest politeness,
which has established it.

If the Italians have a genius for music above the English, the
English have a genius for other performances of a much higher
nature, and capable of giving the mind a much nobler entertainment.
Would one think it was possible, at a time when an author lived that
was able to write the Phaedra and Hippolitus, for a people to be so
stupidly fond of the Italian opera, as scarce to give a third day's
hearing to that admirable tragedy? Music is certainly a very
agreeable entertainment: but if it would take the entire possession
of our ears; if it would make us incapable of hearing sense; if it
would exclude arts that have a much greater tendency to the
refinement of human nature; I must confess I would allow it no