the airs of opera sung as commonly upon the streets in Venice as our own
colored melodies at home; and the street-boy when he sings has an inborn
sense of music and a power of execution which put to shame the cultivated
tenuity of sound that issues from the northern mouth--

"That frozen, passive, palsied breathing-hole."

In the days of the Fenice there was a school for the ballet at that
theatre, but this last and least worthy part of dramatic art is now an
imported element of the opera in Venice. No novices appear on her stages,
and the musical conservatories of the place, which were once so famous,
have long ceased to exist. The musical theatre was very popular in Venice
as early as the middle of the seventeenth century; and the care of the
state for the drama existed from the first. The government, which always
piously forbade the representation of Mysteries, and, as the theatre
advanced, even prohibited plays containing characters of the Old or New
Testament, began about the close of the century to protect and encourage
the instruction of music in the different foundling hospitals and public
refuges in the city. The young girls in these institutions were taught to
play on instruments, and to sing,--at first for the alleviation of their
own dull and solitary life, and afterward for the delight of the public.
In the merry days that passed just before the fall of the Republic, the
Latin oratorios which they performed in the churches attached to the
hospitals were among the most fashionable diversions in Venice. The
singers were instructed by the best masters of the time; and at the close
of the last century, the conservatories of the Incurables, the Foundlings,
and the Mendicants were famous throughout Europe for their dramatic
concerts, and for those pupils who found the transition from sacred to
profane opera natural and easy.