Fifty thousand people
nightly crowd twenty different theatres in New York. From the splendid
halls where Grisi and Gazzaniga and La Borde and La Grange have by turns
translated into sound the ideas of Meyerbeer and Bellini and Donizetti and
Mozart, to the little rooms where sixpenny tickets procure lager-beer as
well as music for the purchaser, the drama is worshipped. And this not only
by New-Yorkers: not only do those who lead the busy, excited life of the
metropolis acquire a taste, as some might say, for a factitious excitement,
but all strangers hasten to the theatres. The sober farmer, the citizens
from plodding interior towns, the gay Southerners, accustomed almost
exclusively to social amusements, the denizens of rival Bostons and
Philadelphias all frequent the operas and playhouses of New York. When the
richer portion of its inhabitants have left the hot and sultry town, or, in
mid-winter, are immersed in the more exclusive pleasures of fashionable
life, even then the theatres are thronged; and in September and October you
shall find all parts of the country represented in their boxes and
parquets,--proving that this is not an exclusively metropolitan taste, that
it is shared by the whole nation, that in this also New York is truly
representative.
Boston typifies a peculiar phase of American life; it is the illustration,
the exponent, of the cultivated side of our nationality; its thought, its
action, its character are taken abroad as symbols of the national thought
and action and character, in whatever relates to literature or art.
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