Note 785 — CANTO THE SIXTEENTH.[768]

I remember that the mayoress of a provincial town, somewhat surfeited with a similar display from foreign parts, did rather indecorously break through the applauses of an intelligent audience—intelligent, I mean, as to music—for the words, besides being in recondite languages (it was some years before the peace, ere all the world had travelled, and while I was a collegian), were sorely disguised by the performers:—this mayoress, I say, broke out with, "Rot your Italianos! for my part, I loves a simple ballat!" Rossini will go a good way to bring most people to the same opinion some day. Who would imagine that he was to be the successor of Mozart? However, I state this with diffidence, as a liege and loyal admirer of Italian music in general, and of much of Rossini's; but we may say, as the connoisseur did of painting in The Vicar of Wakefield, that "the picture would be better painted if the painter had taken more pains."

[A little while, and Rossini is being lauded at the expense of a degenerate modern rival. Compare Browning's Bishop Blougram's Apology. "Where sits Rossini patient in his stall."—Poetical Works, ed. 1868, v. 276.]