For another of the far famed diversions of Vienna, we were just in time: or we may be said to have seen it in its dying state, rather than to have partaken of it. I allude to those faëry extravaganzas of Italian origin, which long made the theatres of the suburbs famous; and in which the Austrian Harlequin, Columbine, and Pantaloon, so many a day contrived to keep the public alive, and to say and to do as many absurd things beyond the bounds of license as a paternal censorship could bear. I was one among some forty people who, in the Leopoldstadt Theatre, solemnly sat through “Der Diamant des Geister Königs”–which, once upon a time, had drawn thither thousands to applaud its broad pantaloonery and pleasant satire.

Sooth to say, the piece, in which the local jokes were lost on me, would have stirred speculation, more than broad mirth, had the theatre been crammed in place of being cavernously empty. It was noticeable, for instance, to observe what things the very same censorship that had allowed Liszt to play, but not to publish, the Rakoczy march (a Hungarian patriotic measure), that had dealt so mercilessly with some of the noble sentiments in Schiller's “Wallenstein” at the Court Theatre—allowed the Pasquins of the Leopoldstadt Theatre to present.