Some Roundabout Papers | Page 8

insane dreams, and I hope
affording amusement to the company, while the feet of five hundred
nymphs were cutting flicflacs on the stage at a few paces distant. Ah, I
remember a different state of things! Credite posteri. To see these
nymphs -- gracious powers, how beautiful they were! That leering,
painted, shrivelled, thin-armed, thick-ankled old thing, cutting dreary
capers, coming thumping down on her board out of time -- that an
opera-dancer? Pooh! My dear Walter, the great difference between my
time and yours, who will enter life some two or three years hence, is
that, now, the dancing women and singing women are ludicrously old,
out of time, and out of tune; the paint is so visible, and the dinge and
wrinkles of their wretched old cotton stockings, that I am surprised how
anybody can like to look at them. And as for laughing at me for falling
asleep, I can't understand a man of sense doing otherwise. In my time, a
la bonne heure. In the reign of George IV., I give you my honour, all
the dancers at the opera were as beautiful as Houris. Even in William
IV.'s time, when I think of Duvernay prancing in as the Bayadere, -- I
say it was a vision of loveliness such as mortal eyes can't see nowadays.
How well I remember the tune to which she used to appear! Kaled used
to say to the Sultan, "My lord, a troop of those dancing and singing
gurls called Bayaderes approaches," and, to the clash of cymbals, and
the thumping of my heart, in she used to dance! There has never been
anything like it -- never. There never will be -- I laugh to scorn old
people who tell me about your Noblet, your Montessu, your Vistris,
your Parisot -- pshaw, the senile twaddlers! And the impudence of the
young men, with their music and their dancers of to-day! I tell you the
women are dreary old creatures. I tell you one air in an opera is just like
another, and they send all rational creatures to sleep. Ah, Ronzi de
Begnis, thou lovely one! Ah, Caradori, thou smiling angel! Ah,
Malibran! Nay, I will come to modern times, and acknowledge that

Lablache was a very good singer thirty years ago (though Porto was the
boy for me): and they we had Ambrogetti, and Curioni, and Donzelli, a
rising young singer.
But what is most certain and lamentable is the decay of stage beauty
since the days of George IV. Think of Sontag! I remember her in Otello
and the Donna del Lago in `28. I remember being behind the scenes at
the opera (where numbers of us young fellows of fashion used to go),
and seeing Sontag let her hair fall down over her shoulders previous to
her murder by Donzelli. Young fellows have never seen beauty like
that, heard such a voice, seen such hair, such eyes. Don't tell me! A
man who has been about town since the reign of George IV., ought he
not to know better than you young lads who have seen nothing? The
deterioration of women is lamentable; and the conceit of the young
fellows more lamentable still, that they won't see this fact, but persist in
thinking their time as good as ours.
Bless me! when I was a lad, the stage was covered with angels, who
sang, acted, and danced. When I remember the Adelphi, and the
actresses there: when I think of Miss Chester, and Miss Love, and Mrs
Serle at Sadler's Wells, and her forty glorious pupils -- of the Opera and
Noblet, and the exquisite young Taglioni, and Pauline Leroux, and a
host more! One much-admired being of those days I confess I never
cared for, and that was the chief male dancer -- a very important
personage then, with a bare neck, bare arms, a tunic, and a hat and
feathers, who used to divide the applause with the ladies, and who has
now sunk down a trap-door for ever. And this frank admission ought to
show that I am not your mere twaddling laudator temporis acti -- your
old fogey who can see no good except in his own time.
They say that claret is better nowadays, and cookery much improved
since the days of my monarch -- of George IV. Pastry Cookery is
certainly not so good. I have often eaten half-a- crown's worth
(including, I trust, ginger-beer) at our school pastrycook's, and that is a
proof that the pastry must have been very good, for could I do as much
now? I passed by the pastrycook's shop lately, having occasion to visit
my old school. It looked a very dingy old baker's; misfortunes may
have come over him -- those penny tarts certainly