This was a bad and disappointing season, marked with little novelty worth commemorating.—Donizetti's “Gemma di Vergy,” and Signor Mercadante's “Elena da Feltre,” were new to our Italian stage. Neither produced the slightest sensation. The latter had been more fortunate in an English dress, owing to the remarkable acting and singing of Miss Adelaide Kemble.

And here, seeing that a young English lady, in spite of the disadvantages of a translated version, and of comrades unused to Italian music, could gain a success for an unknown opera in London—which an Italian prima donna, in all the plenitude of promise and power—I mean Madame Frezzolini—was unable to do—a word or two are not misplaced, in a chronicle of great singers, regarding another great interpreter.

Such was Miss Adelaide Kemble: a musical artist in right of resolution, rather than liberal nature. Her voice, originally limited, had been moulded, rendered flexible, and extended in compass, by study and incessant practice, till it became capable of every inflexion, of every possible brilliancy.—More honest singing than its owner's I have never heard,—add to this, command of four languages and four styles of music, and poetical aspiration borne out by intellectual culture, by habitual commerce with all that is most refined and most thoughtful;—and the result could only be what it was—the greatest English singer (though not the best of this century), a poetical and thoughtful artist, whose name will never be lost so long as the art of dramatic singing is spoken of.