“My father says I must write you every thing of every sort about Agujari, that you may get ready, well or ill, to come and hear her. So pray make haste, and never mind such common obstacles as health or sickness upon such an occasion.
“La Signora Agujari has been nick-named, my father says, in Italy, from some misfortune attendant upon her birth—but of which she, at least, is innocent—La Bastardella. She is now come over to England, in the prime of her life and her fame, upon an engagement with the proprietors of the Pantheon, to sing two songs at their concert, at one hundred pounds a night! My father’s tour in Italy has made his name and his historical design so well known there in the musical world, that she immediately desired his acquaintance on her arrival in London; and Dr. Maty, one of her protectors in this country, was deputed to bring them together; which he did, in St. Martin’s-Street, last week.
“Dr. Maty is pleasing, intelligent, and well bred; though formal, precise, and a rather affected little man. But he stands very high, they say, in the classes of literature and learning; and, moreover, of character and worthiness.
He handed the Signora, with much pompous ceremony, into the drawing-room, where—trumpets not being at hand—he introduced her to my father with a fine flourish of compliments, as a phenomenon now first letting herself down to grace this pigmy island.
This style of lofty grandeur seemed perfectly accordant with the style and fancy of the Signora; whose air and deportment announced deliberate dignity, and a design to strike all beholders with awe, as well as admiration.
She is a handsome woman, of middle stature, and seems to be about twenty-four or twenty-five years of age; with a very good and healthy complexion, becomingly and not absurdly rouged; a well-shaped nose, a well-cut mouth, and very prominent, rolling, expressive, and dyingly languishing eyes.
She was attended by Signor Colla, her maestro, and, as some assert, her husband; but, undoubtedly, her obsequious and inseparable companion. He is tall, thin, almost fiery when conversing; and tolerably well furnished with gesture and grimace; id est, made up of nothing else.
The talk was all in French or Italian, and almost all between the two Doctors, Burney and Maty; we rest, being only auditors, except when something striking was said upon music, or upon some musician; and then the hot thin Italian, who is probably a Neapolitan, jumped up, and started forth into an abrupt rhapsody, with such agitation of voice and manner, that every limb seemed at work almost as nimbly as his tongue.
But la Signora Agujari sat always in placid, majestic silence, when she was not personally addressed.
Signor Colla expressed the most unbounded veneration for il Signor Dottore Borni; whose learned character, he said, in Italy, had left him there a name that had made it an honour to be introduced to un si célebre homme. My father retorted the compliment upon the Agujari; lamenting that he had missed hearing her abroad, where her talents, then, were but rising into renown.