24th. The Globe of this evening has the honesty to point out the discordance in the account given of Paganini’s concert, in two Sunday papers of yesterday. Such things will happen so long as free tickets are accepted by our journals, beyond the number necessary for the actual use of the reporters. It is charitable to suppose, that the writer of the article, who filled the house so overflowingly full, was himself never for one moment within its walls. In this case he may have guessed wrong. But let us hear the Globe:—
‘PAGANINI’s CONCERT. We find the following discrepancies as to a mere matter of fact, in the account given by two of the Sunday papers, in Paganini’s concert on Friday. We, not, however, having been present, cannot decide between these two differing “doctors:”—
‘“Sig. Paganini had his first concert for the season on Friday evening, at the King’s Theatre. The excitement—probably by the delay in the Signor’s appearance, as well as in the novelty of the performances—produced an overflowing house.”—Observer. “The Modern Orpheus was employed on Friday in enchanting the empty boxes and trenches of the Opera House: never was there a greater appearance of desolation within its walls.”—Sunday Times.’
29th. A weekly paper of this date makes a great flourish in an article most unluckily headed ‘critical blunders,’ in which the writer himself commits a couple of choice and entertaining étourderies, much resembling certain small paragraphs, served up for the public amusement in a daily paper, on Monday mornings, and probably from the same goose quill. The learned article runs thus:—
‘Critical Blunders. Certain journalists, our contemporaries, have been somewhat severe upon the “extravagant trash” forming the original libretto of “The Magic Flute,” being, we conclude, unaware that the opera of [the] Zauberflöte is one of the early works of Goethe. The character of Papageno is, in fact, one of the most elegant of his fantastic creations.’
Now it happens, that the drama in question—if such a farrago of nonsense is to be dignified by such a title—was written by Emanuel Schickaneder, proprietor of a suburb theatre at Vienna, who, pleading his embarrassed circumstances, persuaded Mozart to set the opera, and was saved from ruin by the success of the piece. But to saddle the character of Papageno, the bird-catcher, on Goethe, would be ‘too bad,’ were it not so vastly comical. ‘One of his most elegant creations,’ too! Who has now been hoaxing the unhappy victim of many a joke?
—I think I trace the identical pen that wrote the above, in the annexed, which appeared in the very some paper:—