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to it to draw custom to the refreshment tables.

There are two theatres in New-York, and but two which are devoted exclusively to the performance of the regular drama; these are Burton's in Chambers-street, and Wallack's in Broadway. Burton's Theatre was, originally, a bath-house, and was afterwards turned into an Italian Opera House, in the management of which a good deal of money was lost, and Palmo, the proprietor ruined. Burton then took possession of it, and made a fortune. It was the first instance in which a theatre in this city had fallen into the hands of a manager of scholarly attainments and artistic instincts, and the result of his management shows what may be effected by talent turned in the right direction. Mr. Burton has not only enriched himself, but has done the public a service by affording them a place of harmless and elevating amusement. One of the first pieces that he put upon his stage was Milton's Comus, which gave the public assurance that the new manager was a person of education and refinement; and the uniform good judgment shown by him in the pieces he has selected, and the superior manner in which they have been costumed, have made his theatre a superior place of intellectual entertainment for people of educated tastes. Mr. Burton is one of the best low comedians on the stage, and is, himself, one of the strongest attractions of his theatre. But. like a true artist, he never hesitates to take a subordinate part, when it is necessary to give completeness and effect to a performance. He has a devoted attachment to his art, and goes through with his nightly performances, sometimes appearing in three different pieces, with a degree of vigor, and careful attention to all the minute accessories of his part, which we could only look for in an enthusiastic acolyte in the temple of art. Mr. Burton is an Englishman; but, unlike most of his countrymen, he left his native country behind him, when he crossed the Atlantic, and became thoroughly American in his feelings. He was bred to the profession of a printer, and, after his arrival in this country engaged in several literary enterprises. He established the Gentleman's Magazine, now called "Graham's."

Wallack's Lyceum, in Broadway, is an exceedingly elegant little house, the style of the interior decoration is in excellent taste, and the effect of a full house is light, cheerful, exhilarating, and brilliant. James Wallack, the manager and proprietor, is the head of a large family remark

able for the possession of theatrical talent. He was a celebrated actor in London more than thirty years ago, and is still one of the best players in his line,-the genteel heroes of melo-drama,-on the stage. But he rarely makes his appearance before the foot lights. Wallack's Lyceum is Burton's without Burton. Great attention is always paid to the production of pieces at this brilliant little house, and the costumes and scenery form an important part of the attraction. English comedy and domestic dramas form the chief attractions at Wallack's, and the house is generally full. The utmost order and decorum are maintained, both at this house and Burton's, and every thing offensive to the most delicate taste carefully excluded from the stage.

The National Theatre in Chatham-street has long been the resort of newsboys and apprentices, and the style of performances has been very similar to those of the "Bowery;" but, in a happy moment, the manager, a good natured native whom they call Captain Purdy, put Uncle Tom's Cabin upon his stage and at once raised his fortune and changed the character of his house. As it has played this piece twice a day for nearly six months, and is now the family resort of serious family parties, it would be rather hazardous to predict what its future course may be; the old Chatham Theatre was converted into a chapel, and Captain Purdy's is half way towards the same destiny.

Attached to Barnum's Museum there is a large, well arranged, and showily decorated theatre for dramatic representations, where domestic dramas of a moral character are performed, and a version of Uncle Tom adapted to Southern tastes has been a long time running. The "St. Charles," is a small theatre in the Bowery which was built for an actor named Chanfrau, who was the creator of the universally recognized character of Mose, the type of the New-York gamin.

The Italian Opera House in Astor Place has been adapted to the uses of the Mercantile Library Association; and the new opera house in Irving-place, which bids fair to be one of the most magnificent structures devoted to music in the world, is not yet sufficiently built to be described; but we shall describe it hereafter.

Since we commenced writing this article the most beautiful and spacious place of popular recreation in New-York has been swept out of existence by one of those sudden and disastrous conflagrations which have earned for New-York the appellation of the City of Fires. Metropolitan Hall,

which was unrivalled for its extent and splendor by any concert room in the world, together with the superb marblefronted hotel in which it was inclosed, with all their wealth of embellishment and taste, the embodied forms of labor, genius, and skill were suddenly whiffed out of existence on the morning of the 8th of January. The engravings which we have the good fortune to possess of these superb structures are all that now remain, but the memories of those ornaments of our city.

Castle Garden, the unique, remains, where opera, music, and the drama are presented by turns. It is a hall of unequalled advantages for public exhibitions, which was originally a fort, but has long been appropriated to the refining arts of peace.

The Ethiopian minstrels have become established entertainments of the public, and among them are three permanent cómpanies in Broadway; the Buckleys, Christy's, and Wood's, where the banjo is the first fiddle, and the loves of Dinah and Sambo form the burthen of the perform

ances.

The Italian Opera, too, is now an established institution in the New World, but it leads a vagabondish kind of a life at present, and has no permanent house of its own, although one is erecting for it.

We are neither wealthy enough nor sufficiently educated in music to monopolize an Italian troupe at present, but are compelled to share this luxury in common with our neighbors of Boston, Philadelphia, Havana, Mexico, Valparaiso, and Lima. The Italian Opera is the highest order of theatrical entertainment, and demands a class of educated and wealthy people for its proper support more numerous than we have yet been able to boast of. There are never more than half a dozen good singers before the public at a time, and in competing for their services, we have to contend with, not the people of other cities, but with their monarchs, the Emperor Nicholases and Emperor Napoleons, who never hesitate to spend the money of their subjects to purchase pleasures for themselves.

The circus is still the most popular of public amusements, and it is conducted on a magnificent scale as a regular business speculation by enterprising citizens. The most famous riders now in Europe are graduates of the American ring. The Hippodrome, in the Fifth Avenue, was an attempt to transplant Franconi's from Paris. But the Hippodrome was too exotic to thrive in our climate, and, after a season of doubtful success, it has closed probably for ever.

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MEMOIRS OF DR. VERON.

Memoires d'un Bourgeois de Paris par le Docteur
L. VERON, comprenant: La fin de l'Empire, la
Restauration, la Monarchie de Juillet, et la
Republique jusqu'au rétablissement de l'Em-
pire. Tome Premier. Paris. 1853. pp. 380.

IT

T is scarcely necessary to say that we have read with great interest Dr. Veron's memoirs. They are a gossipping narrative of the last thirty years of French life. The first volume only has appeared, which is rather a preface to the other volumes than a chronological relation of its parts to this period of time; it nevertheless contains a great many curious pictures of French society during this period, which we, who are separated from Paris by a winter's Atlantic, could scarcely find any where else. A great many Frenchinen hold that French history begins only with the advent of Napoleon, and they reckon the antecedent years as merely the history of the Louises and the Henrys and the Charleses who have sat upon the throne. Gross as is this mistake (which, by the way, has just been clearly exposed by M. Augustin Thierry*), it is very certain that French society has undergone several radical changes since the Eighteenth Brumaire, and that the national character differs nearly as much from that of the Frenchman of the reign of Louis XIV. as he differed from the Gaul described by Cæsar. The general specimen of a Frenchman given by our school books of geography, and which represent him with a cocked hat and a ruffled bosom, and dancing under a tree, is quite as inapplicable to a Frenchman of the present day as it would be to a Sioux Indian. The gayety, and contentment, and careless generosity, which once were the prominent traits of the French character, have completely disappeared; he has become ambitious, and discontented, and avaricious. Successive radical revolutions, which, by the most formal laws, expressed in the most absolute terms, and in more than one instance passed by the selfsame body of men, have dethroned every ruler of the country, and have in turn exalted to the skies and debased to the sewer every form of government and every family of governors known to the country: more than once the traitor's gaol has been the footstool to the throne; the fatal influence of the article of the Code Napoleon, which provides an equal distribution of

estates among the deceased's male and female children, share and share alike, has dilapidated every fortune, and beggared the lower classes of the rural population; the complete loss of power and of position of the aristocracy of the nation; the number of successful adventurers the revolutions have tossed to power, and the consequent demoralization of all classes of society; the insatiable thirst for wealth (now the only social distinction in a country where quite as many ex-cabinet ministers are rotting in gaols, or living by their wits in an exile's abode, as may be found in fashionable drawing-rooms), and the inexorable demands of money made by all, even the least social positions, have corrupted the French nation to an inconceivable degree-we had almost said, have made them as astute and as unprincipled as the modern Greek. Our reader will see we are very far removed from the cocked hat and ruffled shirt Frenchman who capered gayly under a tree.

A truce, however, to these general reflections. Let us trace this society from the end of the Empire to the present time, by the examples Dr. Veron places before us; let us carefully mark the different phases he presents, and we may, at the end of the work, be better enabled to form an idea of that strange phenomenon -French society.

Before dipping deep in his book of memoirs, let us stay a moment to examine the character of the writer: indeed his first chapter provokes the inquiry; it is entitled, Qui je suis, "Who I am." Dr. Louis Veron was born the 5th April, 1798. He chose medicine as a profession, and prosecuted it with energy and success. He tells us that when he saw all the volumes which compose a student's first library he felt that it was necessary he should give himself up completely to study, and lead a quiet, sober, and uninterrupted life; getting up early in the morning, shunning exciting dinners, and hastening to his garret immediately afterwards, and taking good care to find no society there but his books. He confesses he found the study of anatomy and of pathology rather dull; he hit upon a plan to enliven them: to read some of the great writers of the seventeenth and of the eighteenth centuries, and never to have a cent of money in his pocket;

* Essai sur l'Histoire de la Formation et des Progrès du Tiers-Etat, Par Augustin Thierry. VOL. III.-11

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"poverty has made a great many great men." His parents gave him twenty francs the first of every month, and the day he received them he lived like a lord; they were spent with the day he dined with some of his friends at a restaurant, and went to some theatre, and finished his day at the Café du Roi, then the favorite resort of the wits and the men of letters. In 1821 he was appointed au concours first interne of the hospitals; he was made a doctor of medicine in 1823. He went every morning in winter from the Rue du Bac to the Hôpital de la Pitié by five o'clock, that he might reach there before the van which takes off from the hospitals all the unreclaimed bodies of the deceased patients, that he might select the best of them, and with his scalpel prepare them for the students studying anatomy. He remained, too, for some time in the Hospice des Enfans-Trouvés; every morning, thermometer in hand, he gave some fifteen of these foundlings, affected with a hardening of the cellular tissue, a vapor bath; during one year, he dissected at the least a hundred and fifty foundlings, and studied in a spoon the milk of more than two hundred nurses. Dr. Veron, however, abandoned his ambition of becoming a professor of the Medical school, in consequence of a defeat in a concours for the prizes of anatomy, natural history, natural philosophy, and chemistry; his rivals were MM. Andral and Bouillaud, and they carried off all the prizes; M. Orfila however afterwards told him that he had voted for him for the first prize in natural philosophy and chemistry, and his fortunate rival, M. Andral, complimented him on his lecture on electricity. The result of this concours persuaded Dr. Veron he had powerful enemies among the Faculty; he did not appear at another concours, and shortly after published a pamphlet upon the diseases of infants, containing notes on croup and on an abscess in the thymus. (At the birth of the Count de Paris, the Duke d'Orleans, being anxious about the health of his first child, asked Dr. Blache which was the last and the best treatise upon the croup: Monseigneur, replied the Doctor, the last and the best treatise upon the croup is by Dr. Veron, the manager of the opera.) He removed from the Quartier Latin to the Chaussée d'Antin, where he opened a doctor's office, but he avows in all humility that no client ever paid him a visit. One night, however, about three o'clock A. M., he was called up by his porter and two or three old women to go and see an old porter's wife hard by, whose

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nose had been bleeding for more than six hours; he arrested the bleeding, and all the old women of the quarter sounded his praises with feminine volubility. His reputation rose from the porter's lodge to the first floor, and it was not long before he had three patients: one of them was a rich woman, who was no longer young, and rather corpulent; it was necessary to bleed her :

"Every body is talking," she said to me, "Monsieur, of your skill and of your learning, and I have quitted my physician to receive the care of a gentleman so celebrated as you already are. All of my acquaintances will follow my example, and in a very short time you will have the most brilliant practice in Paris." He had often heard his old professor and friend, M. Roux, the most skilful surgeon in the world say, that when he had to bleed a person he always was uneasy; and Dr. Veron began now to be nervous; however, he was obliged to make the attempt; he took hold of the patient's arm; she continued to overwhelm him with praises; he plunged in the lancet; he did not touch the vein; he plunged in the lancet again; no blood came. Oh! then the scene changed: "You are a miserable awkward fellow; the meanest surgeon bleeds better than you. How I pity the patients who confide themselves to your care. Bandage my arm up as quickly as you can, and take yourself off; you have doubtless maimed me." "The day of my grandeur," says the Doctor, "was the eve of my fall, and an unsuccessful bleeding had wrecked all my castles in the air; humiliation was mixed with my despair, and when I returned home, I said in a very decided tone to poor Justin, my porter, whom I afterwards made collector of the opera: "Justin, I do not intend practising medicine any more, I will never bleed again, and if any body asks for a doctor, say there's none in the house."

After thus bidding adieu to the profession of medicine, Dr. Veron founded the Revue de Paris in 1829. There was then but one literary journal published in France, Le Mercure, which was published under the editorship and "by the expedi ents" of M. Gentil, whom M. Veron afterwards made the keeper of the " proper ties" at the opera; M. Gentil, however, could give the young writers, his contributors, nothing but praise and publicity; but he was a firm partisan of the "romantic school," as may be seen, when we are told that he is the author of that brief and celebrated judgment which made so

much noise in its day: "Racine est un polisson." The Revue de Paris was a joint stock company, with a capital of 80,000 francs, and Dr. Veron took 20,000 francs of shares; he was presented to the wealthy M. Aguado, Marquis de Las Marismas, who took some shares in the enterprise. We shall hereafter frequently find the Aguado family in relations with Dr. Veron. Some of our readers may remember that the latter years of the Restoration saw the commencement of the famous war of the Romantics and the Classics, which excited a great deal of passion, and occupied the public mind even in the midst of the crisis, which lasted during the last years of the Restoration and the first years of the Monarchy of July. Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, and Alfred de Vigny, were the leaders of this war waged on the dramatic unities enforced by Aristotle, and which were defended by the French Academy, with a great deal more bitterness than judgment. The foundation of the Revue de Paris rendered a great deal of service to the Romantic school, and indeed to French literature, as it was in its pages, and on the editor's annual budget of 40,000 francs, that MM. Prosper Merimée, Sainte-Beuve, Saint-Marc-Girardin, Casimir Delavigne, Arnault, Charles Nodier, Jules Janin, and Eugène Delacroix commenced, or increased their reputation. MM. de Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and Rossini were also among the contributors. Dr. Veron promises to speak in due time of all the eminent writers and artists, with whom he lived in a daily intimacy, and to give a great many of their letters, which will place in a new and a clearer light the secret history of French literature during the last twenty-five years. He gives us a taste of these future revelations by these letters:

FROM A. DUMAS.

"My dear Veron,-See how men of talent work. I send you a hundred and twenty pages of blank paper, have them stamped by your servant in the corner opposite to the numbers. Return them to me Thursday morning by the first train. You will find your volume commenced when you come to dine with me Thursday 14th, and I will return it to you finished when I go to dine with you Thursday the 21st.-Yours. A. DUMAS."*

FROM GEO. SAND.

"Monsieur, - You vex me extremely by asking for a novel a month earlier than our common engagements provide. It is a great inconvenience to my health, and a great danger for the merit of the story to work in this hurry, without having had the time to mature my subject, and to make the necessary researches; for there is no subject, however small it may be, which does not require a great deal of reading and of reflection. I think you treat me a little too much like a stop-gap; my amour propre does not suffer by it, and I have too much esteem and friendship for Eugène Sue to be jealous of all your preferences for him. But, if you give him the time necessary to develope fine and great works, time is also necessary to me to arrange my little studies, and I cannot engage to be ready whenever the suppressions of the Juif Errant may require it, nor to have it terminated when the Juif Errant is ready to commence his tour around the world. All that I can promise is to do my best, because I sincerely desire to serve you: I pass by in silence the annoyance of setting again to work, when I reckoned upon another month of very necessary_repose. I have already abandoned it; I have been working since

*This characteristic letter of the most prolific writer of this century will suggest to our reader's mind an incident the newspapers recently mentioned. M. Alexandre Dumas is at present living in Brussels; a forced expatriation, we believe, in consequence of the involved state of his pecuniary affairs. He engaged with the manager of the Theatre Français to deliver a five act comedy by an appointed day, and he received a large advance in money for the forthcoming work. Two days before the delay expired, Mlle. Petra Camera, an accomplished Spanish danseuse, who appears to have half-crazed Paris, came to Brussels, and M. Dumas gave her a Monte-Christo fête, at which every body eat, drank, danced, and sung until four o'clock in the morning, when, his guests having retired, M. Dumas sat at his writing desk, and wrote the fourth act, and the fifth act in the course of the ensuing day. The Censors interdicted the comedy; whereupon he wrote this letter to the Manager of the Theatre Français:

"My dear Manager,-I have just come from Brussels, having received notice that the Censors have stopped La Jeunesse de Louis XIV. This is Tuesday, I ask leave to read to you next Monday. I will read you five acts. I don't know yet what I shall read you, for this news has taken me by surprise; but the five acts shall be called La Jeunesse de Louis XV. I shall take care that the scenery, &c., you have ordered, and which I am told is all ready, may be used in this play. I need not say that there will not be in La Jeunesse de Louis XV. a word or a situation from La Jeunesse de Louis XIV., which shall remain intact until it pleases the Censors to return it to you. If I am ready before Monday I will have the honor to inform you. Wholly ALEXANDRE DUMAS." yours,

Tuesday, 11 o'clock.-Exert a little diligence on your part and the piece may be represented in three weeks. Friday evening he wrote the following note to the manager:

"My dear Houssayé,-As I foresaw, I shall have finished the piece before Monday. So you may appoint the reading of La Jeunesse de Louis XV. for to-morrow, Saturday. Wholly yours, Friday Evening.

ALEXANDER DUMAS."

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