passed by him on the music of a kindred spirit,
Herr Wagner: yet he could write that amazing
opera, Les Troyens.

The creative, the critical, and the presiding
artist were alike incomplete. When Berlioz
was in London as a professed conductor, he
had no scruple in more than once standing
before an orchestra to superintend the
performance of music which he had never
rehearsed, nor even perused, such as
Mendelssohn's violin concertos. Yet who could write
more glibly and sonorously about sincerity and
conscience in art than he could? Who be more
intensely sarcastic on the slovenly proceedings of
those who protested nothing, as compared with
himself? In brief, as an example of arrogance
in censure, and carelessness in preparation,
Berlioz, as a critic, cannot be too plainly
characterised for the guidance and warning of
those who take on them the responsibility of
dealing out praise and blame, and of lecturing
a younger generation on the truths, beauties,
and purposes of Art.

When, however, Berlioz was in one of his
quieter and less antagonistic moods, and
confined himself to the very few subjects he had
mastered, he could be brilliant, original, and
instructive. His criticisms on Gluck's music,
whether written or spoken, were deep, truthful,
and ingenious. Next in his favour stood the
compositions of Beethoven's decay time. After
these came the music of Weber. It will be
remembered that, to qualify Der Freischütz to
appear on the stage of grand French Opera,
where spoken dialogue is not allowed, he
composed musical recitatives. The confusion of
these, and their utter absence of charm or
dramatic expression, can hardly be overrated.

When M. Berlioz cared to be so, he was
admirable as an orchestral conductor—fiery,
delicate, precise, and animating; gesticulating,
it may be, a little too much, but obviously so
thoroughly in earnest, that his directions and
gestures had not the offence which always
attaches itself to feigned enthusiasm. The only
instrument with which he was practically
conversant was the guitar. Of the organ, as has been
said, he knew nothing. He praised the harp to
the skies, and his use of that picturesque, but
restricted instrument, was original and effective.
Unless memory has strangely exaggerated the
facts, at the execution of some numbers of the
Romeo and Juliet symphony in London, a
squadron of ten harps was called in, to be used
only in the movement, "The Fête of the
Capulets." He had ideas of monstrous
combinations: of four distant orchestras or more,
brought under simultaneous control by the
agency of the electric telegraph. Yet what
was the most gigantic and ambitious of his
devices compared with the orchestra of cannons,
by the platoon-firing of which Sarti timed his
Te Deum, composed on the occasion of the
taking of Ocsakow by the Russians?

To sum up, the artistic career of Berlioz,
cannot be called either a healthy or a happy
one. He was devoured by aspirations. One
so shrewd as himself, however, must have
felt, in the secrecy of self-examination, that
there was no chance of his ever realising
them permanently. Sterile in melody,
incomplete in science, with a vague, yet
passionate sense that something was yet to
be done in music, especially in the combination
of sounds, as distinguished from the arrangements
and expression of thoughts, he bent
himself to tasks of a difficulty altogether
impossible to overcome. Taking the works of
Beethoven's last unhappy years as his point
of departure, he tried to improve on his model
—forgetting, in the violence of his resolution,
that Beethoven's crudest and least well-
cemented works, flung out during a period of
misery and defiance, still contain a treasure of
original ideas which no uncouth treatment
or maltreatment could conceal, still less
annihilate. It is perfectly true, that he was
indulged with occasional outbursts of patronage,
as in Russia, Vienna, Baden-Baden, and
Weimar. But these, it may be fairly asserted,
failed to place him in the solid position of
European fame which he coveted. His greatest
admirers, as was once pithily remarked, were those
who the least understood music. It may be
doubted, without any undue scepticism, whether
works, so slender in idea, so elaborately and
awkwardly overwrought as his, will be long
thought worth the trouble of reproduction,
now that the personality of their author as a
superintendent, the sarcasms of his tongue,
and the severities of his pen, are no more.

                 MELUSINA.

IN TWO CHAPTEES.   CHAPTER II.

IT surprised none of the keen-eyed Golden
Islanders that Mrs. Magniac shortly
exchanged her name for that of Fonnereau—
and reigned at Mon Désir.

To do the lady justice, she betrayed no
atom of triumph. Mistress, of course, she
was—and mistress she evidently intended
to be—but Greraldine had abdicated with
a grace and promptitude that left nothing
to desire; and Melusina repaid her with a
gushing tenderness nothing short of
maternal—finding herself, in turn, amply
recompensed by the increasing gratitude and
confidence of her husband.

Her influence over the latter augmented,
almost daily. Poor Geraldine, while
unable to point to any one act or word, on
the part of her stepmother, to justify her
suspicion, became sensible that she was
gradually undermining the attachment that
had hitherto subsisted between her father
and herself. If this conviction—always
bitterly present to her mind—occasionally
tinged her speech, Melusina would meet
it with a patient smile—or, what was
more intolerable, a glance of intelligent
appeal, to her husband—which, if it
produced no present result, satisfied Geraldine