land were Jenny Lind (who seemed convinced that Chopin was not to blame in the Sand affair), Lady Blessington, and he met the leaders of society and the most distinguished men and women of the day. He had won the lifelong friendship of Miss Jane Stirling, whose rare beauty fascinated the imagination and haunted the canvases of the celebrated Ary Scheffer. To this lady is dedicated the Deux Nocturnes; and he stayed with her and her sister at their home in Scotland. He also passed much of his time at Calder House, twelve miles from Edinburgh, where, while the guest of Lord Torphichen, his surroundings-'the beautiful country of Walter Scott '-impressed his imagination with historic associations; he thought of Mary Stuart, the two Charleses. The chamber above the apartment in which he slept was the one in which John Knox for the first time dispensed the Sacrament. 'Everything here,' he writes, 'furnishes matter for the imagination.'

Chopin died in Paris on October 17, 1849.

His place among the virtuosi must be associated with all that is most gracious, most refined, and most pure in art; and every record of his playing which has come down from authentic sources testifies to its completeness, its perfect realisation of poetry, its spiritual

abandon. It is of the class, therefore, which belongs to its originator alone; it cannot be imparted, and it must not be confounded with schools and technicalities; it was a part of the genius which, first having conceived the glorious sea of music, set out in its golden pinnace and spread its purple sails over its waves.

DE BÉRIOT

1802-1870

E BÉRIOT'S name and fame have an

DE name an

of readers, with the pleasant power of romance, to the vision of the beautiful and gifted Malibran.' The great singer and the masterly violinist were united at the flower-period of their lives, and the death of Malibran-one year after their marriage-was a blow from which the brother-artist and lover-husband never really recovered. Both have their page in history; but that bond of love and sympathy which bound them together, in the prime of their beauty and the high-tide of their artistic triumphs, must ever constitute the page commanding and enchaining the best interest of the student. The beautiful Malibran died in the very flower of her loveliness, at the age of twenty-eight, when her glorious powers were in their glowing summertide, and an entire continent bowed in enthusiastic homage; breathing

her last sigh into the ears of the husband for whose love she had refused all that conventionality offers as a bribe to weaker spirits; and De Bériot carried with him to the grave— through thirty-six years of chequered life-the undying memory of that tender, passionate affection which roused into flame the fiery energies of his genius, and cast a halo of poesy and romance over his short season of wedded happiness.

The true era of the virtuosi dawned at the beginning of this century. The earlier soloists played to exclusive audiences, who exacted the work of the composer in whom, for the timebeing, the player was merged. Music had not become the possession of the million; it was a luxury reserved for the wealthy and the cultured, and appealed to the understanding as well as the ear. The pit and gallery had not yet been invented. With the spread of musical knowledge to the masses came the growth of the individual power and consequence of the violinist or pianist; and while the stream of tendency overflowed the banks of aristocratic privilege and exclusiveness, it ran into the shallows and outlying reaches, where the people, unaware of the significance and beauty of its deep-sea tones, were disposed to listen to its ripple and splash

among the pebbles. The one-stringed dexterity of Paganini excited universal applause; his execution, his arpeggios, his harmonics, were the theme of general wonder; and the people who had been awestricken by his almost demoniac power, and who were melted to tears by his magic pathos, left his concerts to talk only of his marvellous dexterity. Thus the school of variations and fantasias was founded; solos were selected and composed with a view to display the technical skill of the performer. Florid and eccentric passages, modelled upon Italian taste, complicated by brilliant arpeggios and dexterous manipulation of the finger-board, were substituted for the grand simplicity of the old masters.

De Bériot was a brilliant performer, a master of technique, and did not escape the influences of the school of which he was the product; but he was also a musical thinker and interpreter of a high order, and there is no reason to doubt that, in a later period, he would have acquitted himself in a manner worthy of his genius, and in a style of music which is now universally recognised as the best adapted for exhibiting the capacity of the violin. Unmoved by the spirit of reform, he was content to expound, and even to accentuate, the taste of his times