years. He was afraid of his own youth, and did not yet dare to please himself only. About this time, having received some slight from the impresario of the theatre to which he belonged, Rossini revenged himself by an extravagance which so brought down upon him the hisses of the audience, that on the production of his Tancredi directly after, he hid himself under the stage in fear of their anger, till applause had given him courage to take his accustomed place at the piano. Obliging the musicians to the obedience they owe the maestro, at the allegro of the overture the violins, docile to his order, interrupted each measure by a tap of the bow on the tin candlestick fixed to the music-deskthe whole opera was arranged like the overture. The impresario made peace with Rossini, and the latter composed Tancredi. The success of this last was such, that throughout Venice every one, from gondolier to nobleman, sang "Ti rivedrò;" even in the courts during trials the judges imposed silence on the auditory, which chanted also "Ti rivedrò, mi rivedrai." It is of this opera his biographer says, "It has no luxury about it; it is genius in its naiveté; if I may be allowed the expression, genius yet virginal." Yet its author received for it only £24.

The anecdote of the "Aria dei rizi" (the rice air) belongs to Tancredi. Rossini had composed an air which La Malanote, then in the pride of her beauty and her talent, refused to sing, signifying her objection only two nights before that of the performance. The poor young man returned pensively to his small inn. Every dinner in northern Italy commences by a dish of rice, and as it is eaten very little done, four minutes before he serves the cook sends to ask the important question, "Must the rice be put on the fire?" As Rossini entered his room in despair, the cameriere made the usual demand, and was answered in the affirmative. The rice was put down, and before it was ready, Rossini had written the air which has since been sung all over Europe, "Di tanti palpiti," and which has retained the name of "Aria dei rizi" in Venice.

The mechanism of Italian theatres is as follows:

"An impresario, (there is in French

or English no word which gives the meaning of this precisely,) often the richest patrician of a little town, since the occupation brings along with it importance and pleasure, but is often ruinous, takes the theatre into his own hands, and forms the company. The impresario engages a maestro to write the new opera, who must be careful to suit his airs to the voices which are to sing. He pays for thep oem (the libretto) an expense of from sixty to eighty francs. The author is usually some unhappy abbé, the parasite of a rich house, a comic part still filled in all its glory in Lombardy, where the smallest towns have five or six families having an hundred thousand francs a year. The impresario gives the care of the financial affairs of his theatre into the hands of a subordinate, usually the arch-rogue of a lawyer, who serves him for steward, and he himself falls in love with the prima donna. The grand curiosity of the little town turns on whether he will give her his arm in public. The company orga nised, the opening night arrives after a month of burlesque intrigue, which makes the talk of the whole country round. Eight or ten thousand persons discuss during three weeks the merits of the opera, with all the power of atten tion, and of lungs, they may have received from heaven. This first representation, when not producing scandal, is generally followed by twenty or thirty more; after which the company dis perses. This is called a season.

"From this sketch of theatrical manners the reader may form an idea of the singular life of Rossini from 1810 to 1816. He visited in succession all the towns in Italy, passing two or three months in each. His mode of composi tion is peculiar. Received and entertained on his arrival by all the dilettante, he passes the first fifteen or twenty days in receiving dinners and shrugging his shoulders at the stupidity of the libretto. 'You have given me rhymes, not situations,' I heard him say to a muddy poet, who overwhelmed him with excuses, and two hours after brought him a sonnet 'To the honour of the greatest composer in Italy and in the world.' Having given so much time to dissipation, he begins to refuse dinners and soirées, and occupies himself seriously with the study of his actors' voices. He makes them sing to the piano; and we see him obliged to mutilate his finest conceptions because the tenor cannot reach the note needed by his idea, or because the prima donna's voice is always untrue in the passage from such a key to such another. At last, three weeks before the first performance, knowing his instruments well, Rossini begins to write. He rises late,

composes while his new friends converse, for do what he will they remain with him all day. He dines with them at the hotel, and often sups there, returning very late, while they accompany him to his door, singing in chorus the music he has improvisé-sometimes a Miserere to the scandal of the quarter. At last he is at home, and it is at this time, about three in the morning, that his most brilliant inspirations seek him. He notes them down hastily, without trying them on his piano, on small pieces of paper, which he arranges in the morning while talking with his friends."

Rossini was often obliged to write for voices become untrue. "To compose was nothing," he was in the habit of saying; the rehearsals were enough to make him hiss himself. Beyle judges him feeble in airs which should express passion with simplicity. In reply to a reproach addressed to him at Venice, he answered, "Dunque non sapete per che cani io scrivo?" Never rich enough to insist on leisure and the exercise of his own will, his indolence often induced him to repeat himself. "Thus," Beyle observes, "the same music re-appears with but slight alterations in parts of L'Aureliano in Palmira,''Il Barbiere,' and 'L'Elisabetta.'"

On his arrival at Naples, Mademoiselle Colbrand, since Madame Rossini, was in all her power of voice and splendid beauty. Afterwards this same voice became so untrue that the public, whose greatest enjoyment lay in the music of their operas, deserted them perforce; but, compressed by an iron hand, did not dare murmur. King Ferdinand protected the director Barbaja-Barbaja protected Mademoiselle Colbrand.

"I have heard her," says Beyle, "sing so out of tune that to bear it was impossible. I saw my neighbours abandon the pit with their teeth on edge, but without saying a word; and this lasted five years. The king's complaisance for Barbaja estranged from him more hearts than did any act of despotism. In 1820, for the real happiness of the Neapolitans, it was not theSpanish constitution which should have been given them, but Mademoiselle Colbrand who should have been taken away. She injured the talent of Rossini, who could no longer reckon on her voice, and whom she persecuted to insert in the airs intended for her the fioriture it was used to."

It would seem that Rossini did not, at least at this time, belong to the mass of his countrymen, whom it is Beyle's delight to point out as divested of the vanity he calls the curse of France. His mother, who was his only correspondent, he addressed-" All' ornatissima Signora Rossini, madre del celebre Maestro"-a jest which was half serious. Our author has heard him say, when affirming his equality with minister or general" They drew a prize in the lottery of ambition-I in the lottery of nature." The praises he received were indeed sufficient to justify this self-appreciation, At a Mass performed at Naples, composed of portions of his finest music so arranged as to take the appearance of church chants, a priest said to him seriously" Rossini, if you knock at the gates of Paradise with this Mass in your hand, whatever your sins may be, St. Peter cannot fail to open to you."

"In 1819, Rossini played a trick on a Venetian Impresario, who engaged him to write an opera for four or five hundred Sequins, a heavy sum in Italy. In love with Madlle. Ch- he made up his mind to quit Naples only a fortnight before the day fixed for the first performance, though from time to time, to satisfy the Impressario's impatience, he sent him parcels of music. Arrived at last, and bringing out his opera Odoardo e Cristina, it was received with transport. Unfortunately there sate in the pit a Neapolitan merchant who hummed each morceau before the singers, to the great astonishment of his neighbours. In answer to their questions he said,This is Ricciardo and Zoraida, and Ermione, which I applauded in Naples six months ago. I am wondering why you have changed the names. The Impresario was furious, but Rossini affirmed he had kept the only promise he had made, which was, to furnish him with music which should be received well, and called him a fool for not having perceived it was old by the edges of the papers, which had turned yellow."

His facility was extraordinary.

"On a cold day in the winter of 1813, he had put up at a poor inn in Venice, and composed in bed to avoid lighting a fire. He was then writing the music of Il figlio per azzardo.' The sheet of paper escaped from his hands, and de

scribing zigzags in its way to the floor, deposited itself under the bed. He stretched forth his arm to regain it, but the air was bitingly cold, so he refolded himself in his blanket, thinking he could easily recollect what he had written and write it again; but not a note recurred to him. He lost a quarter of an hour in impatience at his forgetfulness, and at last laughed at himself. Pshaw!' he said, I will compose another-rich men may have fires in their bedrooms. I cannot pick up duets if they fall; besides it is a bad omen.' As he finished its comrade a friend entered. Will you,' he asked him, reach me a duet which must be under my bed.' The friend brought it to sight with his cane and gave it to Rossini.Now,' said he, I will sing both to you, and you shall tell me which pleases you most." The friend preferred the first. Rossini without loss of time made of the second a terzetto for the same opera, dressed hastily, swearing at the cold, went out with his friend to take coffee and warm himself at the casino, and sent the waiter with the sheet just written to the music copier of the theatre."

Light, lively, piquant, never wearisome, rarely sublime, Rossini seemed expressly formed to awake ecstacies in mediocrity. Far surpassed by Mozart in tenderness and melancholy, by Cimarosa in comedy and passion, he is equally incapable of writing faultlessly as of noting down twenty measures without giving proof of genius. Since Canova's death he has seen himself placed at the head of living artists. What rank the future will confer on him, I cannot tell. If you will promise secresy I will say that the style of Rossini something resembles the Parisian, vain and lively rather than gay, never impassioned, always clever, rarely fatiguing, more rarely sublime."

Many causes contribute to augment the Italian's natural love for music. How can he read in a country where the police intercept three fourths of the books which enter it, and note down, in the red volume, the imprudent individuals who peruse the remainder. From want of habit, a book has become, in the eyes of young men, a nuisance, whose very apparition makes them tremble. By the forced absence of study, in a country crushed beneath the double tyranny of its priests and police, and paved with spies, the poor young man has for pastime only his voice and bad piano, and necessarily ponders over the impressions of his own soul as the only novelty at his disposal."

"All the faces you meet in the street in Paris present you with the amusing image of some little shade of feeling. Generally it is busy egotism in the men of forty, an affectation of military air in those younger; in women, a desire to please, or at least to point out to you to what class of society they belong. The Italian in the street despises or does not see the passers-by. The Frenchman would fain have their good opinion. The Parisian from the moment he goes out in the morning finds a hundred petty occupations. Since the downfall of Napoleon nothing disturbs the tomb-like silence of the little Italian town-at the very most, once in six months the arrest of a Carbonaro. Thus not only have they strong emotions, but their emotions are economized."

"As to the provinces in France I would fain say something, but I fear to touch on so important a subject. The solitude, caused by fear of being compromised, if they show themselves in a street or café, ought to be favourable to passion and imagination; but that which the provincial,' shut up in his parlour, fears most is ridicule. Paris is the object of his boundless respect and his profound and malignant jealousy. Seeming so full of vanity and assurance, they are in fact the men who doubt themselves most and most fear to be alone in their opinions: they are not sure that it is cold in January unless they read it in the Paris papers."

"It suffices to see the Beggars' Opera, to hear Miss Stephens or the famous Thomas Moore sing, to recognise in the Englishman's nature a very considerable vein of sensibility and love for music. It appears to me that this is most developed in Scotland. I have no doubt that, if in place of being poor, Scotland had been a rich country, if chance had made of Edinburgh, as of St. Petersburgh, the residence of a powerful monarch and an opulent and idle nobility, the natural spring of music, which gushes forth among her rocks, might have been cherished and purified, and we should have said Scotch as we now say German music. The country which is proud of Robert Burns may incontestably give to Europe a Haydn or Mozart."

We have placed side by side the last few observations which, though referring to the same subject, are scattered through these volumes, interspersed with the anecdotes, which are Beyle's avowed mode of painting individuals and countries. In all his works the same themes constantly recur. In the

expression of enthusiasm for the arts and contempt for his own country, he never grows weary. His power of telling anecdote and his knowledge of his adopted Italy, even in the shades which make the difference between Bologna and Florence, Rome and Naples, are no where better shown than in his "Rome, Naples, and Florence." We regret the impossibility of extracting from it. Fulfilling more than its title promises, we find, wondrously amalgamated, observations on society, curious portions of history, and fine appreciations of art. He deserves the reproach he addresses to Rossini, since he repeats himself constantly. In this work we find several pages already printed in "l'Amour," and the system of constitutions touched on there, and copied from the sixth memoir of Cabanis, he developes largely in his "History of Painting in Italy," a work remarkable for its research and able criticism, as for the added information with which its author throws light on the lives of Michael Angelo and Leonardo de Vinci, and by no means improved by this borrowed philosophy. His "Promenades dans Rome" are the best guide and the most entertaining volumes yet written by any traveller who has striven to make it known his sure and cultivated taste, his historical research joined to the wit which was so truly his own, will seldom be united. His tendency to materialism we may deplore without attempting to excuse. It might be mostly the fault of the time he lived in and the country he chose. He found free-thinking and fanaticism, and adopted the first. He had watched the Jesuits, and listened to details given by a head of their order as to how the pupils were excited to betray each other, and the betrayers cited as models to the rest, with the maxim of "do what you will and recite afterwards the Deo Gratias which sanctifies"-turning from them in disgust, he had trod too far. Still we must do him the justice to say, that if he wrote "Man is not free to avoid that action which at the time being seems conducive to happiness," we find elsewhere, "to be criminal and yet happy, it would be exactly necessary to be divested of all remorse. I do not know if such a being can exist; I never met him."

It is as a novelist we think the talent of Beyle more decidedly shown than in the abstract theories, and obscure philosophy, to which he attached so overweening an importance. The "Chartreuse de Parme" and "L'Abbesse de Castro" are two of the most remarkable novels of our day. The former exhibits a broader knowledge of human nature (Italian nature); the interest of the last is more sustained, its faults of composition fewer. These and his minor "Chronicles of Vittoria Accoramboni, la duchesse de Palliano, the Cenci," his talent and his predilections peculiarly fitted him to paint in their proper colours. For the foundation of all, Beyle avowedly had recourse to the manuscripts his industry discovered. By his account, each little Italian town possesses in these a mine hitherto unexplored and difficult of attainment, from their being written in the peculiar dialect of the district, and which varies at every twenty leagues throughout Italy. In "the Chartreuse de Parme" the Countess Pietranera married against the will of her proud brother, the Marquis del Dongo, is a widow when the story opens, living in an old fortified castle near the lake of Como with this brother's family, the young son, Fabrice, growing to be the hero of these two volumes. In the Countess Pietranera's love marriage, and her husband's violent death we might have incident and interest sufficient for an English novel; but here we are but on the threshold. She quarrels with a Cavalier servente because he fails to avenge Pietranera, a circumstance which seems a contradiction, but is not one in Italy; passes years in her romantic seclusion, and at last, issuing forth, meets at Milan and captivates there the prime minister of a despotic principality, which Beyle calls Parma, and is very like Modena. She makes a marriage of mere form with a Duke Sanseverina, who resides elsewhere, and is not introduced to our acquaintance, and takes up her residence in Parma, where she gives charm to the court and rules the affections of its most amiable diplomatist, Count Mosca. The despotic state, with its small intrigues and great crimes, is drawn admirably, as is the duchess with her cleverness and passion and her conventional code of morality. She lives on

so comfortably after it, that we need not recollect she really has committed murder, and to excuse ourselves from considering her still so charming, we repeat that it was by proxy and to avenge an attempt on Fabrice. When afterwards the same danger recurs to him-" If she had been born in the north," says Beyle, "she would have said from the habit of self-examination, I slew by poison, therefore those I love die by poison.' Her thoughts were elsewhere. Clelia Conti, the delicate and high-minded heroine, by one of our author's whims, does not appear till the second volume. The superstition which spoils this fine character is another proof of the writer's local knowledge. The chapters which describe the imprisonment of Fabrice, and Clelia's pity for the captive growing to attachment, are the most interesting of the work. Prisoner for a supposed crime, through the court intrigues, which would fain exile Mosca, Fabrice twice escapes poison; once by flight, which Clelia renders possible, once by her personal intervention. But in remorse for injury she has well nigh done her father, who is governor of the citadel, she makes a solemn vow to the Madonna, "that her eyes shall never rest on Fabrice again." She is married and avoids him throughout two years. At last he obtains entrance; she places her hands before her eyes that she may hear him without breaking her oath. And when Fabrice, comprehending with surprise that to keep it thus literally will satisfy her conscience, hastily extinguishes the lights, ere he sits down beside her, she says, "you have tarried long !" When their child dies, she believes it a punishment from heaven, not on account of the infringement of her marriage vow, but of this made to the Madonna, since she has seen Fabrice at public ceremonies, and often during her boy's illness. She dies of grief for his death, and Fabrice follows her after a year of seclusion and piety in the Chartreuse; for what renders the work more curious and characteristic is, that he is Archbishop of Parma. To those who would know Italy as it is, we recommend the perusal of these volumes.

To examine whether they be of dangerous tendency or not would be to enter into another question. Beyle is an epicurean, his favourite

maxim that "the path to choose is that which leads to happiness"— writing of Italians, he applies the scale of Italy, for vice and virtue, and so imbues himself with the colours he copies, that he seems to share the feelings of his personages; and therefore there may exist some danger of his carrying along with him, not the judgment, but the sympathy of his readers. The truest observer of manners, the most competent judge of the arts, often illogical and contradictory in his reasoning, and inconsistent in his materialism, he was a man of deep feeling and original mind, which, had he listened to them, would have best confuted his acquired fallacies. He had a dignity of character which shrunk from success obtained by meanness and intrigue, and inspired his contempt for the crowd which can be caught by such bait; therefore he inscribes his volumes "to the happy few." His vanity was refined as excessive, he sought to please the exceptions. He is never wanting in ideas, but they are crowded and jumbled like an amateur's pictures, without regard to subject or manner. He was an extensive traveller, an accomplished linguist, and acquainted with all the remarkable men of his day. The literature of Europe was familiar to him, and he preferred that of England. Some of his best pages are consecrated to Shakspeare. We have had in our possession many of his letters, which would prove, if necessary, his research as a scholar, and his kindliness as a man. Always generous, if not always gentle, he is deplored by those who, knowing him well, knew also that the hard, rough rind which guarded, did not harm the fruit. The epitaph which he wrote for himself some years ere he died, and may be read now on his tomb at the Rond Point de la Croix of Montmartre churchyard, tells the tale of his life

ARREGO BEYLE.

Milanese.

Visse, Scrisse,

Amò,

Mori,

Anno 1842.

We cannot better close our article than by a few pages extracted from the second volume of his "Promenades dans Rome." It is the account of a