English ladies of her rank, very sure to entertain with the best-toned hospitality. Our barrack of a capital, so dependent on society for its happiness, may owe much to a lady's ministrations in this way, as the charming examples of the Spanish Minister's house, and one or two others, have long shown. We hope Lady Bulwer's train will comprise two or three young English ladies of her own class, as well as the gayer class of attachés, who follow, of course, where the Envoy is a wedded man; and that the British Embassy will be here, what it is in the capitals of the Continent-the model and centre of all things courteous and hospitable.

SAMUEL LOVER.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TRIBUNE:

MR. LOVER's arrival among us is both more and less of an event than many take it to be: in the way of dramatic exhibition not so much, and in the way of a remarkable presence much more. My impulse to write to you is partly a dread, for him, of the rock Shakspeare had in his mind when he said, “ Promising is the very air of the time, Performance is ever the duller for his act." From various causes I think he will be ultimately better appreciated in this country than he ever was in his own-much as they think of him in England; but, from the ordinary mode of advertisement, and from the common phraseology of newspaper notice, many might go to his "Irish Evenings" expecting something more pretentious and dramatic than they would find, and it is against this possible counter-current of disappointment that I wish to guard his first appearance among us. I am anxious, for our American sake, that there should be no delay, no hesitancy, no lack of completeness, in the recognition of this fine spirit, and it is from having had my heart moved like an instrument under his hand-as the hearts of all are who hear him-that I feel a strong wish for his coming rightly before the public. Lover is, as you know, the writer of songs equal (in popular effect) to any of Burns's. He is the author of Tales of humor, in a vein in which he has no equal. His songs are set to his own music, of a twin genius with the words it

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fuses. His power of narration is peculiar and irresistible. His command of that fickle drawbridge between tears and laughter-that ticklish chasm across which touch Mirth and Pathos-is complete and wonderful. He is, besides, a most successful play-writer, and one of the best miniature painters living. He is a Crichton of the arts of joyance for eye and ear. But it is not of his many gifts that I am now particularly aiming to remind your readers.

I wish, if I may so express it, to anticipate our knowledge of Lover as a man. The probability is that nineteen in twenty of those who know of his arrival, remember to have heard of him as an admired frequenter of the exclusive circles of London, and expect to see a finished man of the world, whose ore of genius has been tinselled over with superfine breeding, and whose stamp from Nature only comes to daylight in the thought of his songs. Their curiosity to see him, indeed, is half made up of a wish to see what sort of a man gives pleasure to lords and ladies, Court wits and exclusives, and their preconceived ideal is of a very fine gentleman, of polished coolness, high art in his music and manners, and the most beautiful concealment of his necessary contempt for dollar-paying Republicans. Of some of the social celebrities of England this might be a very just estimate and faithful ideal-but to Lover such anticipation were an injustice, and one which is as well prevented from throwing a prejudice over his past reputation.

In his personal appearance Lover has no smack of superfine clay. He looks made out of the fresh turf of his country, sound, honest, and natural. He is careless in his dress, a little absent in his gait and manner, just short and round enough to let his atmosphere of fun roll easily about him, and, if frayed at all in the thread of his nature, a little marked with an expression of care-the result of years of anxieties for the support of a very interesting family. His features seem to use his countenance as a hussar does his jacket, wearing it loosely till wanted: and a more mobile, nervous, changing set of lineaments never played photograph to a soul within. There is always about him the modest unconsciousness of a man who feels that he can always employ his thoughts better than upon himself, and he therefore easily slips himself off, and becomes the spirit of his song or story. He does nothing like an actor. If you had heard him singing

the same song by chance at an inn, you would have taken him to be a jewel of a good fellow, of a taste and talent deliciously peculiar and natural, but who would spoil at once with being found out by a connoisseur and told of his merits. He is the soul of pure, sweet, truthful Irish nature, though with the difference from others that, while he represents it truly, and is a piece of it himself, he has also the genius to create what inspires it. To an appreciative mind it of course adds powerfully to the influence of a song, that the singer himself conceived the sweet thought, put it into words, and melted it into music.

Lover (I am trying all this time to convey) is so much better a thing than a fine gentleman, or an accomplished actor or musician--so genuine a piece of exuberantly gifted Nature, still unspoiled from the hand of God-that the appeal for appreciation of him is to that within us which is deeper than nationality or fashion-to our freshest and most unsunned fountain of human liking. He has been recognized and admired for his nature, in the most artificial society in the world. It would be strange, indeed, if he should find himself farther from appreciation of it in a new republic.

I have given you no idea of his peculiar style, but have endeavored only to say what was not likely to be said soon enough by those unacquainted with him.-Yours truly, W.

MRS. ANNA BISHOP.

WE are not grasshoppers. We are not so devoted to the singing muses (that is to say,) that, like the slender-legged dilettanti of the fields, we have listened ourselves into echoes. Our readers (for whom we live, move, and do our admiring,) are content to know the name and magnitude of the planets among the prima donnas, but are willing to let the lesser ladies take their "milky way," named but in nebulæ, if telescoped at all.

What our country and Southern readers wish to know about Mrs. Bishop is the fish to be nibbled for in our inkstand this morning, and we shall endeavor, with a single eye to their satisfaction, to catch it, and it only. The critics are quarrel

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ling with scientific bodkins, about her ear and her voice, but we take it our readers care little to know whether her voice is a sfogato," or a filo di soprano--whether she commits the harmonic atrocity of consecutive fifths, or gluts the ear with her excess of the diminished seventh. They (our charming subscribers) want a straight-forward, comprehensible, daguerreotypical, and as-personal-as-possible account of who she is, how much of a beauty, whether well dressed, and (last and altogether least) what is her particular style of singing. At this we go.

Mrs. Bishop should be called Lady Bishop, for her husband is a Knight; and if she has a right to his name at all she has a right to his title. How she comes to be away from Sir Henry, and under the charge of an old gentleman of sixty, who weighs three hundred pounds, and plays the harp divinely, it is each subscriber's business to guess for himself. Public opinion has put in practice its decision, that questions of this nature shall only be raised to the professional prejudice of unattractive women. Signor Bochsa, we may add here, is the modern King David, never named without his harp, the long known teacher of England's aristocratic learners upon this becoming instrument, a wonderful player thereupon, and has been a very handsome man in his day.

In sculpture, we believe, the face is finished last, and of the great number of women who seem to have been slighted only in the finishing, Mrs. Bishop is one. Her figure and movements seem perfection, but her features are irregular, and it is necessary to be very near her, to see what expression has done to supply the incompleteness of her beauty. When singing, her soul takes the effect into its own hands, like a clock that strikes right whether the dial is wrong or no; and the way her nostrils, lips, and eyes, express beauty where beauty is not, is worth deaf and durib people's coming to learn substitution by. When she stands near the footlights on the stage, however, (and we wonder whether she knows it,) the sharp throwing up of all the shadows of her features, by the ascending light neutralizes even this expression, and she is then seen to great disadvantage. These misthrown shadows particularly destroy the greatest peculiarity of her face-her upper lip the nerve that follows the arched line of its redness playing with its curve like a serpent on the rim of a cup, and holding the expression in command with a muscular pliable

ress and vivid grace, that seems as if it would force the blood through if the nicest shade of its will of expression were not obeyed. Eyes of kindling and fearless vitality, teeth unsurpassable, and brilliant complexion, are beauties there was not so much need of educating, but they fulfil their errands to perfection. We have not mentioned her nose. She is going South, where, in the taste for blood horses, she will find an appreciation for the inspired anl passionate play of her thin Rostrils, of which the North is as an audience incapable.

If Mrs. Bishop did not sing at all, and tormented no speculation in the sex of whose qualities she has as much as she likes, she would still be an object of very great curiosity to the sex whose costume she wears—she dresses so faultlessly, and, with such consummate art, communicates her motion to what she wears. The test is most trying, of course, in the dress with which ladies are most familiar; and, at a concert, therefore, where she appears only in the evening dress of a lady, she is seen to the best advantage for comparison; though on the stage, whatever her costume-Tancredi or Linda, male or female-she equally presents the faultless type of its perfection. It is a rarer thing than it would seem at first naming, to see how a high-bred, thoroughly educated, unerringly comme il faut lady dresses and bears herself in full dress, and of this sort of courtly phenomenon Mrs. Bishop is as fine a specimen as we ever saw in Europe. Her management of her hands and arms, her reception of applause, her look of inquiry as to the will of an audience in an encore, are all parts of the same picture of accomplished high breeding, and we presume we are not wrong in mentioning this among her attractions as a public performer.

The critics concur that we have never had in this country a more perfect singer than Mrs. Bishop, as to taste and execution. She has a clear, high, manageable voice, and she has taken it thankfully from nature and made the most of it. It does not seem to matter much to her what language she is to sing in, or what style of song, or what music. Her pronunciation and execution are alike admirable in all. At her concert the other night she did what we should have predicted was impossible for her-full musical justice to two of Moore's most exquisite melodies. But, though we say "full justice, we must add that Nature suffers no faculty to perfect itself to independence of the heart. Some tones must be breathed on by