Ninette (wildly). A flood of memory rushes through my brain!
Fernan (excitedly). Ninette, my daughter, look at me again.
Ninette (seizing his nose). Yes, yes, that nose decides me—yes—you are—
Fernan. At last—at last! he—he! she knows her pa!
In a mock love-scene with Ninette, Gianetto (Miss Ternan) draws the following comic picture:—
Fancy a bower with rose and jasmine graced,
Such as we see in small tea-gardens placed;
Where friendly spiders and black-beetles drop
On to your bread and butter with a flop;
Where mouldy seats stain sarsnet, satin, silk,
And suicidal flies fall in the milk;
Where we can scorn the heartless world's attack,
Though daddy-longlegs may creep down your back;
Smile at society's contemptuous sneer,
Though caterpillars tumble in your beer;
Where chimneys never smoke, and soot don't fall,
Where income-tax collectors never call,
Where one's wife's mother never even once
Visits her darling daughter for six months;
Where bills, balls, banks, and bonnets are not known—
Come, dwell with me, my beautiful—my own.
Turning to the burlesques of opera of the German school, we begin, naturally, with Mozart, whose "Don Giovanni" found humorous reflection in two pieces, by H. J. Byron and Mr. Reece. The former's "Little Don Giovanni"[45] belongs to 1865, when it was performed at the Prince of Wales's, with Miss Wilton (Mrs. Bancroft) as the hero, Clarke as Leporello, Miss Fanny Josephs as Masetto, Mr. Hare as Zerlina (probably his only appearance on the stage in petticoats), Miss Sophie Larkin as Elvira, and Miss Hughes as Donna Anna. Don Giovanni was the last burlesque part written by Byron for Miss Wilton, and, moreover, it was the last burlesque part she ever played. She records in her Memoirs that an amusing feature of the piece was the spectacle presented in the last act by the Commandant's horse, which, in allusion to a recent freak in Leicester Square, had been covered with a variety of spots, and "looked like an exaggerated Lowther Arcade toy." Mr. Reece's burlesque was called "Don Giovanni in Venice," and came out at the Gaiety in 1873.
In 1842 Macready revived at Drury Lane Handel's delightful "Acis and Galatea," and the opera was promptly caricatured by W. H. Oxberry in a piece produced three days afterwards at the Adelphi. The travestie of "Acis and Galatea" which was seen at the Olympic in 1863 was from the pen of Mr. Burnand. Its full title was "Acis and Galatea, or the Nimble Nymph and the Terrible Troglodyte"; and the Nimble Nymph (described as "a Nymph of the Sea, who also visits the land—a nymphibious young lady") was played by Miss Hughes. The puns were prolific, and so were the parodies, the best of which are written in caricature of the absurd English translations in the operatic "books of the play." Here, for example, is a setting of the trio in "Trovatore"—"Il tuo sangue":—
Polyphemus. With you, oh, sanguine, I'd share your 'art, oh!
'Twould be a stinger, ho! if no go.
(As to her) Dear! (as to himself) Oh, folly! be calm, oh! I'm misty!