ainir*
MR. ALFRED Mzrzon brings his promenade concerts in Covent Garden Theatre to a close this evening. They have been well at- tended, and consequently, we presume, successful in a pecuniary sense, as they certainly have been successful in raising the artistic standard of this species of entertainment. Jullien was the first who infused taste and refinement into concerts of this kind. He gradually succeeded in inducing the restless and noisy crowds who thronged his promenades to listen with patience, and then with attention and pleasure, to the extracts from the works of the great masters which he intermingled with his polkas, waltzes, and quadrilles. Mr. Mellon has gone further in the same direction—increasing the severity of his selections, and sometimes eliminating from them the popular element altogether. Nay, he has gone so far, several times, as to confine a whole evening's entertainment to an oratorio—Elijah or The Creation. We doubt whether this is not going too far : not that those performances proved failures, for the audiences were as nume- rous, attentive, and seemingly decorous as on any of the other even- ings, but one cannot but feel that sacred music is out of place at a promenade concert; and, moreover, this class of music is given by the Sacred Harmonic Society at Exeter Hall on terms sufficiently low to be within the reach of the general public, and in a style of complete- ness and grandeur immeasurably beyond these Covent Garden per- formances, which lacked the "means and appliances" requisite to give due effect to the master-works of Mendelssohn and Haydn.
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