débutante and the singers who had preceded her--Grisi, Bosio,
Piccolomini, and the rest.

A vast amount of reminiscences would have been justified by such
a celebration, for it would have thrown a bright sidelight on the
marvelous career of Mme. Patti, a career without parallel in the history
of the last half-century. Within three years after she made her first
essay "our little Patti," as she was then fondly spoken of, had achieved
the queenship of the lyric stage; and, now, twenty-two years later, her
title had not suffered the slightest impairment. Within the time singers
who had won the world's admiration had been born, educated, and lifted
to the niches prepared for them by popular appreciation, but all far
below the place where Patti sat enthroned. Stars of great brilliancy
had flashed across the firmament and gone out in darkness, but the
refulgence of Patti's art remained undimmed, having only grown mellower
and deeper and richer with time. Truth is, Mme. Patti was then, and is
still, twenty-five years later, a musical miracle; and the fact that she
was in New York to sing in the very spot in which she began her career
twenty-five years before should have been celebrated as one of the
proudest incidents in the city's musical annals. For the generation of
opera-goers who grew up in the period which ought to be referred to
for all time in the annals of music as The Reign of Patti, she set a
standard by which all aspirants for public favor were judged except
those whose activities were in a widely divergent field. Not only did
she show them what the old art of singing was, but she demonstrated
the possibility of its revival. And she did this while admiring
enthusiastically the best results of the dramatic spirit which pervades
musical composition to-day. Her talent was so many-sided and so
astonishing, no matter from which side it was viewed, that rhapsody
seems to be the only language left one who attempts analysis or