The performances of the Royal Italian Company were this year resumed at the Lyceum Theatre, under the accustomed cloud of rumours.—There would be no new theatre, said those who were afraid of one.—The resources of “the old house” had been refreshed by yet another miraculous interposition; and the old favourites, who had been affronted thence, seven years before, on the plea of their being worn out, were about to be brought back thither in triumph:—as if the value of an artist was to be changed by a removal from the Strand to Charingcross! It is a real gratification to think of the ruin which attends all such malicious attempts to injure; most of all, when “the shop over the way” has any connexion with the arts, whose mission, say the preachers, is to humanize mankind.

This second Lyceum Season, like the former one, being merely provisional, it followed that no great amount of novelty could be attempted.—Yet there was one, too remarkable in the finished perfection with which it was presented, not to be remembered with the liveliest pleasure—the Italian version of M. Auber's “Fra Diavolo.”

In London, where this opera was dressed for the Italian stage, with sung, for spoken recitative, something of its artless vivacity might be lost: even though the composer had made additions and allowed interpolations from other operas, so as to enhance the importance of its scale.