it should linger in Mrs. Howe's mind for the reason that the family
to which she belonged moved in the circles to which the new form of
entertainment made appeal. A memory of the incident which must have been
even livelier than that of Mrs. Howe's, however, perished in 1906, when
Manuel Garcia died in London, in his one hundred and first year, for he
could say of the first American season of Italian opera what Æneas said
of the siege of Troy, "All of which I saw, and some of which I was."
Manuel Garcia was a son of the Manuel del Popolo Vicente Garcia, who
brought the institution to our shores; he was a brother of our first
prima donna, she who then was only the Signorina Garcia, but within
a lustrum afterward was the great Malibran; and he sang in the first
performance, on November 29, 1825, and probably in all the performances
given between that date and August of the next year, when the elder
Garcia departed, leaving the Signorina, as Mme. Malibran, aged but
eighteen, to develop her powers in local theaters and as a chorister
in Grace Church. Of this and other related things presently.

In the sometimes faulty and incomplete records of the American stage to
which writers on musical history have hitherto been forced to repair,
1750 is set down as the natal year for English ballad opera in America.
It is thought that it was in that year that "The Beggar's Opera" found
its way to New York, after having, in all probability, been given by
the same company of comedians in Philadelphia in the middle of the
year preceding. But it is as little likely that these were the first
performances of ballad operas on this side of the Atlantic as that the
people of New York were oblivious of the nature of operatic music of
the Italian type until Garcia's troupe came with Rossini's "Barber of
Seville," in 1825. There are traces of ballad operas in America in the
early decades of the eighteenth century, and there can exist no doubt at
all that French and Italian operas were given in some form, perhaps, as