To return, however, to the Opera. As we have already observed, about four years ago its prospects were bad. Discord, the forerunner of dissolution, had squatted itself in the Green-room. With one or two exceptions, the artists who for some years had been the chief pillars of that stage abandoned it for a rival establishment. With the few hands who stuck by the old ship, it seemed scarcely possible to make a fight. But at the most gloomy moment, when all seemed desperate, a good genius came to the rescue. One Swede proved more than an equivalent for half-a-dozen Italians, and impending ruin was replaced by triumphant success. London presented the singular spectacle--unprecedented, we believe, in any capital--of two enormous theatres simultaneously open for the representation of Italian operas. How it fares with the more modern establishment, we have no positive knowledge. Not too well, we fear, judging from the balance-sheet of a recent lessee. Should the experiment succeed, the public will doubtless be the gainers. We shall be glad to learn that all thrive and flourish; but meanwhile we are particularly pleased to find that the more ancient temple of music and dance, endeared to us by long habit, old associations, and much enjoyment, has risen, at the very moment when ill-omened prophets predicted its fall, to as high a pitch of excellence as, within our recollection, it ever attained; and has escaped conversion to an equestrian circus, a shilling concert room, a Radical debating hall, or any other of the profane and degrading purposes to which of late years it has been too much the fashion to apply the large London theatres. When the enthusiasm excited by Jenny Lind, which at one time approached infatuation, began to subside, and that amiable and charitable, but--if rumour lie not--somewhat capricious lady, fluctuating between matrimony and fame, at last took a middle course, and decided to cross the Atlantic, Her Majesty's Theatre had another stroke of good fortune. The Swede disappeared, but Germany came to the rescue. A singer whose name recalls the most glorious days of the Opera, and who, for nearly twenty years, had exchanged the artist's laurel wreath for the coronet of a countess--the plaudits of Europe for the ease and elegance of a court--was induced to return to the profession of which, during the short time she in her youth had exercised it, she had been one of the brightest ornaments.