The position of a successful lyric primadonna with regard to other artists and the rest of the world is altogether exceptional, and is not easy to explain.

Her value for purposes of advertisement apparently exceeds that of any other popular favourite, not to mention the majority of royal personages.

A respectable publisher has been known to bring out a book in which he did not believe, solely because a leading lyric soprano promised him to say in an interview that it was the book of the year.

Countless brands of cigars, cigarettes, wines and liquors, have been the fashion with the flash crowd that frequents public billiard-rooms and consumes unlimited tobacco and drink, merely because some famous 'Juliet' or 'Marguerite' has 'consented' to lend her name to the articles in question; and half the grog-shops on both sides of the Atlantic display to the admiring street the most alarming pink and white caricatures, or monstrously enlarged photographs, of the three or four celebrated lyric sopranos who happen to be before the public at any one time.

In the popular mind those artists represent something which they themselves do not always understand.