Note 254 — CANTO THE FOURTH.
Reading edition
It is strange that it should be the Pope and the Sultan, who are the chief encouragers of this branch of trade—women being prohibited as singers at St. Peter's, and not deemed trustworthy as guardians of the harem.
["Scarcely a soul of them can read. Pacchierotti was one of the best informed of the castrati ... Marchesi is so grossly ignorant that he wrote the word opera, opperra, but Nature has been so bountiful to the animal, that his ignorance and insolence were forgotten the moment he sang."—Venice, etc., by a Lady of Rank, 1824, ii. 86.]