As we are on the subject of Festivals, when are we going to have the York Festival, rumours of which we have heard from time to time, and which will, of course, be in the hands of the very clever organist of York Minster, Mr. Tertius Noble? One knows that for some time past Mr. Noble has been exceedingly busy in building up a native choir and a native orchestra which shall do justice to the ancient glories of York Minster as a musical town; but it would be interesting to discover precisely at what point he has arrived in his undertaking. York has always struck the present writer as a city which, no less than Nürnberg, would have proved an excellent centre for the great comedy of "Die Meistersinger." Wagner, as an Englishman, would have, it might have been, set his guilds and his singers in York, for here, too, are all the elemental accessories of the great drama; there is the lovely river, there are the adjoining fields, there are the narrow streets, and, moreover, in the Middle Ages there were all the various guilds and their precise ways and works. But we have had no Wagner, and the scenery of all English Grand Opera is usually set in the Tirol, the Black Forest, or in the suburbs (shall we say?) of Prague.