however. As time went on, in addition to other causes of friction, Madame Berlioz developed what her husband characterises as “a mad, and for some time absolutely groundless jealousy ;" and in 1840 he met her objection to his going on tour alone by decamping to Brussels with another lady. His wife's death, in 1854, let loose in him floods of sentimentality, and brought a letter of consolation from Liszt, reminding him that she had inspired him to sing of her, and piously adding, "Her task was done!" It was a letter, Berlioz remarks, such as Liszt alone could write; and it would be pleasant to think that it was. He now married again, this time a young vocalist, Mdlle. Rezio by name; and after her sudden death he sought out the earliest of his loves, his Beatrice, the "Estelle" of his autobiography - the "tall slight girl" who had fascinated him when she was eighteen and he twelve, and who was now a widow. "I recognised the divine. stateliness of her step," says this Romeo of sixty, describing their first interview; "but, O heavens, how changed she was!-her complexion faded, her hair grey." It was certainly inconsiderate of her to have allowed Time to play such havoc with features which he had doted upon half a century before. Nevertheless he induced her to promise to receive his letters, and some of them were answered; but "Estelle" maintained a prudent reserve, and the first love of her incorrigible adorer was never exposed to the test of marriage. Of his other loves there is no space to speak. Enough, perhaps, has been said to show that no one ever more nearly succeeded in reducing the romantic passion to an absurdity. The love-affairs of Liszt and of Georges Sand's "petit Chopin" furnish illustrations as striking as any that have been given of the emotional aberrations of the romanticists. But it is pleasanter to prove the rule by exception by recalling the case of the Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning of music. In his sensitiveness to feminine charms, Robert Schumann was excelled by none of the composers. The English type of beauty moved him to ecstasy; but he was catholic in his taste, and made no secret to his fiancée of his delight in all the pretty faces he saw. "They make me positively smirk," he wrote to her, "and I swim in panegyrics on your sex. Consequently, if at some future time we walk along the streets of Vienna and meet a beauty and I exclaim, 'O Clara! see this heavenly vision!' or something of the sort, you must not be alarmed nor scold me!" The caution may or may not have had a touch of seriousness in it; but in any case, it was needless. How full of delight was their wedded life, what a true helpmeet Madame Schumann was to her husband, especially when, from the injury to his hand, he was incapacitated from playing, and how much his fame, after his death, was promoted by her interpretations of his pieces, all the world knows. The whims and caprices which make the lives of the romanticists such entertaining reading form too large a topic to be dealt with in this place. A whole paper would be inadequate to do justice to the vagaries of Chopin alone; and if he stands first among composers as an eccentric, he is not without respectable rivals. Here the subject can only be referred to in passing as connected with the lack of humour which is one of the most signal defects of the musical temperament. That sentimentalism and humour sometimes contrive to run in couples, clear as it may be that they ought not to, the examples of Sterne and Dickens suffice to show. But the conjunction is rare; and the emotional extravagance which is the strongest "note" of musical biography finds little relief in humour-at any rate of the conscious kind. Some of Wagner's devotees have persuaded themselves that their idol was endowed with this choicest of gifts; and one may readily grant that the "Meistersinger" is not without gleams of a humour appreciably above the level of the practical joke, which was the more ordinary result of his efforts in this kind. It is not easy, however, to see how the claim can have survived the depressing letter which, in a mood that he mistook for gaiety, he wrote to Mrs Praeger about his godson. Now and again, to be quite fair, he did succeed in concocting a jest at which, allowing for the Teutonic touch, one may smile consistently with self-respect, as when he checked the ardour of the too noisy trombones in a rehearsal of "Rienzi" with the remark, "If I mistake not, gentlemen, we are in Dresden, not marching round Jericho, where your ancestors, strong of lung, blew down the city walls." For the rest, Haydn was playful rather than humorous. humorous. Mozart struck a deeper note. Beethoven, by virtue of his splendid irony, is entitled to no mean place among the great humorists. And to two or three of the romanticists, who were writers as well as composers, the world is indebted for many a hearty laugh. Much may be forgiven to Berlioz, in particular, for his delightful sallies. In his Memoirs he not only holds up many of his contemporaries to ridicule, but, egoist as he was, he cannot always abstain from poking fun at himself. He recalls his anti-Rossini rage in his early Paris days, when the star of the Italian was in the ascendant, and tells us that he often used to speculate upon the possibility of undermining the Théâtre Italien, so as to blow it and its Rossiniworshippers into space. "And when," he proceeds, "I met one of those hated dilettanti I used to mutter to myself, as I eyed him with Shylockian glance, 'Would that I might impale thee on a redhot stake, thou scoundrel!' Not," he adds, by way of showing the mellowing effects of time on even the fiercest natures-"not that I would now desire to impale any one on a red-hot stake!" How wittily, too, does he tell the story of the three thousand francs which he had so much difficulty in extracting from the French Government for his Requiem. While he was impatiently waiting for the money the Opposition papers began to gird at him "as a favourite of the Government," abused him as "a silkworm feeding on the revenue," and at last declared that he had been paid thirty thousand francs. "In saying this," he observes, "they were merely adding a cipher to the sum I hadn't received!" Having said so much of the faults and foibles of the musical temperament, its lack of balance and sanity, its excesses and absurdities, its habit of taking itself and things in general too seriously, one must in fairness add that, if the phrase may be so twisted, it has the qualities of its defects. It has been shown that in the lives of the masters there is not a little to amuse the cynical, and make the judicious grieve: equally true is it that in no other department of biography is there so much that is pure delight. Nowhere else do we find such sweetness and gentleness, such winsome simplicity, such superiority to the baser incentives to artistic travail. Of the miserable jealousies that have played so large a part among "the petty fools of rhyme," and not among these alone, we see comparatively little here. Nor has the noble generosity with which the composers have known how to treat each other been wanting when the conditions have been those of rivalry. What, for instance, could be more charming than the relations between Haydn and Mozart? It was Haydn's influence that made the way plain for the composer who was fourand-twenty years his junior when the latter came to Vienna. "As an honest man," he once said to Wolfgang's father, "I declare to you before God that I consider your son the greatest of all composers of whom I have any knowledge." To the manager of the opera-house at Prague, who was thinking of giving an opera of his on the evening after one of Mozart's, he wrote that it would be too much to venture, "for next to the great Mozart it would be difficult for any one to stand. Could I," he goes on, "force home to every lover of music the grandeur and inimitableness of Mozart's operas, their profundity and display of genius, . . . the nations would contend for the possession of so rare a gem." This shrinking from a comparison between his own work and Mozart's is all the more significant from the fact that, by one of those eccentricities of self-criticism with which all the arts abound, Haydn regarded his operas as forming his surest title to enduring renown. Mozart, on his side, cherished for Haydn an affection almost passing the love of son for father. "I would not have done that," said Kozeluch, referring to an innovation in a new quartette of Haydn's." "Nor would I," replied Mozart. "And do you know why? Because neither you nor I would have had such an idea!" Nor was Mozart, in the days of his fame, slow to mete out to younger composers the appreciation which had been measured to him. After listening to an improvisation by Beethoven, he went up to the youth's friends and said, "Look after him; he will some day make a great name in the world." Beethoven, again, when towards the end of his life he was shown some pieces of Schubert's, bore emphatic testimony to the gift of the neglected genius, and expressed his regret that they had not been brought to his notice before. And, since there has been occasion to notice some of Berlioz's less amiable traits, let it be said that no one ever more abounded in generous enthusiasm for worthy rivals than this master of caustic criticism. If the composers have not been wanting in the amenities of character, neither have they lacked its pieties. Strange indeed would it be were it otherwise, seeing that music, above all the arts, has found in religion its loftiest inspirations. Bach dedicated all his compositions to the service of God, and, not less than Milton, worked ever as in the great Taskmaster's eye. Handel, gross as were his faults, had strong religious feeling. The smaller ills of life exacerbated his temper; but when overtaken by the blindness which, by a melancholy coincidence, darkened the later years of his great contemporary Bach, he submitted himself to the dispensation with pious resignation. "If I am spared a few years longer,' wrote Beethoven in a time of sore trouble, "I will thank the Al mighty, accepting joy and sorrow as it shall please Him to ordain it." Mozart's Requiem could have come from none but a fundamentally religious nature; and no one ever more truly acted out the wholesome maxim, "Serve God and be chearfull," than did Haydn. "I cannot help it," he said to one who pointed out that all his sacred pieces were marked by gaiety; "I give forth what is in me. When I think of the Divine Being my heart is so full of joy that the notes fly off as from a spindle; and as He has given me a cheerful heart He will pardon me if I serve Him cheerfully." He was not ashamed to avow that while he was composing the "Creation" he daily prayed for inspiration, and believed his prayer was not in vain. The story of his last appearance in public, a few months before his death, has often been told-how he was borne by loving hands to a grand performance of the oratorio in honour of his seventy-sixth birthday-how at the burst of music which accom panies the words, "Let there be light!" there was a tempest of applause, in the midst of which the aged composer, trembling with emotion, looked upwards and exclaimed, "It came from thence!" Not less indicative of the essential spirituality of the musical temperament is the experience of Wagner, whose faith a pessimistic philosophy enthusiastically embraced could not destroy, but only diffuse into a mysticism that goes far to explain the spell his music has cast over minds strongly antagonistic to definite religious belief, but dimly conscious of spiritual cravings which negations can neither appease nor eradicate. In the case of Liszt the conflict long waged in a restless and penetrating mind between faith and doubt issued in the triumph of faith; and he ostentatiously proclaimed his adhesion to the Church with which the romantic temperament, whether expressed in music or in literature, has such obvious affinities. W. W. HUTCHINGS. TH' PLOUGHIN' O'TH' SUNNYFIELDS. "How does feyther find hissel' to-neet?" Mrs Rainford, who had been bending over the fire, slowly stirring the steaming contents of a small black pot, tapped her wooden spoon against the side, and turned round. "Eh, mich same as he allus is," she responded, wearily. "Sometimes a bit better, an' sometimes a bit war. It took me all my time to keep him abed when he heared yo'd started ploughin' th' Sunny fields. Eh, he were that takken to I 'ad to be vexed wi' him at th' last. He allus reckoned bein' at th' ploughin' o' yon hissel', thou knows-it's bin pasture iver sin' gron'feyther's time-____" "Well, it wanted turnin' up bad enough as how 'tis," interrupted her husband, with a roll of his bullet-head. He had been practically master of the Gate Farm for more than six months now, and did not see why his father-in-law should interfere with his arrangements. Old Joe Orrell was indeed the nominal proprietor of the place, but quite incapable of managing his own affairs, having been ill, off and on, all the winter, and indeed kept to bed for a fortnight now. At this moment a kind of husky roar was audible from above. Mary Rainford jerked her thumb over her shoulder and turned her head on one side. The roar was repeated. "'Ark at feyther," said the woman. "He's shoutin' for thee, Tom. Thou'd best nip up- it starts him coughin' awful when he gets excited." Tom went creaking up the stairs willingly enough; he was a good hearted fellow at the core, and anxious to humour the old man in everything that he considered reasonable. Mary paused to pour out a mugful of the gruel she had been preparing, and then followed. Old Joe Orrell was sitting up in bed, his broad bony shoulders showing square through his flannel shirt, his eyes bright under their shaggy brows, one huge hand gripping the bedclothes. Tom stood still just inside the door, and nodded. "Well," he said, "an' how are yo', feyther? Yo' look a deal livelier this arternoon.” Joe stared at him fixedly for a minute or two. "Thou's started ploughin' up Sunnyfields, I 'ear," he growled. "Thou met ha' waited a bit, I think. I reckoned to be at it mysel' this spring." "Well, but yo' aren't able to, yo' see'n," replied Tom, mildly. "I'm noan bahn to stop 'ere mich longer, though. How long dun yo' reckon to keep me shut up? I'm about tired of it, and so I tell yo'. I'll be about when warm weather cooms." Tom gazed at him with a certain stolid compassion, and Mary, standing immediately behind him, heaved a deep sigh and slowly shook her head. Joe glanced at them sharply and resentfully. "I see: yo' count to ha' me under ground afore owt's long," he observed; "but I tell yo' I wunnot dee just yet-so theer!" He sank back on his pillows. "I'm noan bahn to get out of yo'r road as soon as all that cooms to, Mester Tom," he continued, half jocularly. "I dunnot want yo' to get out |