If the premises of my slight prelude be granted, they will amount to a pleading for the publication of thoughts and fancies connected with Meyerbeer's opera too intimately in my mind to be expunged from an honest journal. They will prepare the reader for the assertion, that — time, place, and manner of presentment considered, — the “Robert” is to be accepted not only as an illustration of French art, but as a type of French opinion; whence my crotchets concerning it necessarily take a twofold direction. I can listen to a barrel-organ droning out the never-too-old melodies of “Tancredi” or “II Barbiere;” I can content myself with studying, for their own intrinsic dramatic force or melodic sweetness, the “Fidelio” or the “Euryanthe” of Weber, even when cut down to the meagre shadow of a piano-forte arrangement; but I must see Meyerbeer's operas as well as hear them, and at L'Academie Royale; and all arrangements and transcripts of them have but a value, in proportion as Fancy is pliant, and willing to call up all the pride, pomp, and cricumstance which belong to their representation in Paris. There are only about three separate pieces — Isabelle's two cavatinas in “Robert” and the couplets of the Page in “Les Huguenots” which are eligible or effective in a concert-room.