crowns which are supposed always to be made of laurel, as well as those which bear the effigies of monarchs. Paris was then the centre of taste and the metropolis of art—the occupation of the whole population the enjoyment of pleasures or the ministering to its desires and caprices. Madlle. Sontag's voice and beauty produced a furore—each note produced a murmur or an acclamation. No feature of hers escaped a sonnet, from her eyebrow to her pretty foot. The ugliest women thought they became handsome by imitating her costume; and venders of articles of luxury and fancy goods found no easier way of getting rid of their wares than by stamping them with her name or with her supposed resemblance.

In this, her first engagement at Paris, she made her début in Desdemona. She also performed with great success La Donna del Lago, Cenerentola, and other first characters in the first operas of the day. The Italian Opera season ended, she was eagerly engaged for the next season, and her support secured. She then returned to her engagement at Berlin,—once more at the Kœnigstadt Theatre. Here she was destined to receive, in a very novel form, the greatest compliment she had as yet met with. The Berlinese, who justly deemed her the brightest living ornament of their capital, and considered her as a Prussian, and thus, for two reasons, their property, were indignant that she had left Berlin for Paris, and still more, that she had taken another engagement, and intended to leave them once more. When she appeared for the first time after her return, in the Italiana in Algieri, from all parts of the house there was an explosion of hisses and groans, interspersed with exclamations—"What a shame to leave us!" "Give up your engagement with the hateful French!" "Promise—swear you will remain with us!" &c., &c. The alarm of the manager and of the vocalists engaged in the Italiana was boundless. The jealous husband of the libretto, the favored cicisbeo, even the erotic sultan and his janissaries fled from the theatre, whilst for twenty minutes the fair vocalist remained alone on the stage, mute and immovable as the statue of some nymph in a garden abiding the pelting of a storm. Vain were the efforts of the audience:—

they could extract no concession from the goddess of their idolatry; their courage to persecute her further failed them; and they determined to enjoy the present moment,—"advienne que pourra!" From that night unto the end of the season, the applause and enthusiasm of the audiences of the Kœnigstadt knew no bounds when the singer they had at first regaled with their fiercest sibillations was on the stage.

Madlle. Sontag returned to Paris for the season. The Italian Opera was then fallen under the rule of M. Laurent. There she found Malibran in the plenitude of her fame and glory. The theatrical gossips, and the Parisian gobemouches, either hoped or expected—all of them predicted—that a war was about to arise betwixt the two stars now forced to move in the same orbit—a war which would eclipse the encounters of Juno and Venus in the days of Paris and the siege of Troy. For once the Greeks of Paris, and the Trojans of the Salle Favart, were disappointed. It is little to be doubted that the gentle and affectionate nature of Madlle. Sontag, and the generosity which characterized at all times the impetuous Malibran, would, under any circumstances, have united the two great vocalists—and of this supposition the more than probability is established by the fact that all other cantatrici, of equal pretensions, have never failed to be severed by jealousy the moment they have met on the same stage. But long before Madlle. Sontag's arrival in Paris the second time, she had become acquainted with Malibran. Those amongst our readers who have lived in Paris when it was a centre of society, instead of a centre of revolution, cannot fail to have heard, at least, of the Countess Merlin. This Havanese lady, a gifted practical dilettante, with Countess de Sparre (Madlle. Náldi) and her countryman Orfila (no less distinguished as a vocalist than as Dean of the Faculty of Medicine of Paris, and the greatest of toxicologists), were wont to give concerts which were thronged by all the Melomanes of the French capital. Madame Merlin thus naturally became the "arbiter elegantiarum" of Paris, at least as far as regarded musical taste, and her house the rendezvous of all who aspired to fame on the lyrical stage. Here Madlle. Sontag was frequently invited on her first arrival in Paris. On one occasion, the Countess introduced to her a fair Spaniard, a protégé of hers just arrived from New York. This artist, who had spent some years performing in the inglorious theatres of the New World, was afterwards the celebrated Malibran. Madame Merlin begged Madlle. Sontag to encourage her friend, who, she assured her, had the greatest gifts of voice, by singing with her the duet in Tancredi. Madlle. Sontag cheerfully consented. So astonished, delighted, and overcome were the two fair vocalists at their respective talents, that at the close of the duet, they threw themselves into one another's arms, and from that day began their friendship.

Still the theatrical scandal-mongers did not hesitate for a moment to declare that the two queens of the lyrical stage were devoured by mutual envy and jealousy, and they thought there could not be a doubt of it, from a circumstance which occurred the night Madlle. Sontag sang the Barbière for the first time since her return. Rossini came in the interval betwixt the acts to tell the Rosina of the night, at that moment surrounded by a crowd of admirers, that he had left Malibran in tears in her box, in despair at ever attaining such a purity of tone and such a perfection of execution as she had displayed. This was a sincere tribute of admiration, and not of envy, on the part of that lamented vocalist; whose real character, being impressed with the eccentricity which too often besets genius, few could understand, and whose warmth of heart and imagination made her too often the victim of cold-blooded worldliness.

The truth is, that on her arrival in Paris, Malibran received her fair colleague with open arms. Their meeting produced friendly emulation, instead of hostile pique and rivalry, and the two incomparable singers agreed to perform, in turn, the same operas. Thus did they enact, on alternate nights, Desdemona, Rosina, Cenerentola, &c., whilst they performed together such operas as Tancredi, &c. This was the most glorious—the culminating epoch of the Italiens in Paris. On one occasion, Don Giovanni was given; Madlle. Sontag performing Donna Anna (perhaps the greatest of her triumphs); Malibran, Zerlina; and Heinfetter, Elvira. On this, one of the coldest nights on record, amongst the most stirring, elbowing their way from without, in the rush of the eager aspirants to seats in the house, were observed at the same time, Rossini, Cherubini, Paër, Meyerbeer, and Auber! Well might the journals of the day observe, that no better criterion was needed of the merits of the performers. No doubt each great maestro went there revolving in his mind how such voices might be turned to account in his next composition; for then even the authors of Masaniello and the Philtre, of Il Crociato and Robert le Diable, had not adopted that style of overwrought harmony, of clamorous choral, and of deafening instrumental combination, from which all pure voices of such quality shrink—despairing to find melodic phrases to be uttered without contention with ophicleides and double-drum.

Such was the sisterly love and confidence which existed betwixt the two marvellous vocalists, then engaged at the Italiens, and which is so powerfully