the son of a Dutch Jew, a violoncello
player named Sipruntini. About the close
of 1764, the elder Mozart dedicated a third
set of his son's sonatas to Queen Charlotte;
prefacing them with an extravagantly
fulsome dedication, which showed the
professed itinerant tuft-hunter.

It was at this crisis that scientific men
began to regard the young phenomenon
with serious suspicion and alarm. A
celebrated quidnunc of the day arose to conduct
an investigation of his powers. This quidnunc,
a scholar erudite enough in his way,
was the Honourable Daines Barrington, a
Welsh judge, who had occupied several
snug posts under government. The
Boswell sort of expedition, suggested by many
jealous and suspicious musicians of
London, exactly suited the inquisitor. He
repaired to the house at Chelsea, armed
with a manuscript duet, written by an
English gentleman, to some words in
Metastasio's opera of Demofoonte. The score,
difficult enough to musicians of the
Barrington stamp, was in five sections: two
violin parts, two vocal parts, and a bass.
Here was a clincher; it was impossible that
the boy could have seen the music before.
He sat down to play, keenly eyed by the
suspicious inquirer. Would he play false, or
break down, and prove that all his other
extemporaneous performances had been
prepared tricks? Here would be a triumph
for detective science, and the Honourable
Daines Barrington. But no. The boy sat
down, slipped the score carelessly on his
desk, and began at sight to play the
symphony in the most masterly manner,
equally as to time, style, and the feeling
sought to be conveyed by the composer.
Having played it through, he then took the
upper part, and left the under one to his
father: singing in a thin infantine voice,
but with admirable taste. His father being
once or twice out in the duet, though the
passages were not more difficult than those
the son had attempted, the child looked
back at him with some anger, pointing out
to him his mistakes, and set him right.
The young musician, moreover, threw in,
to Mr. Barrington' s intense astonishment,
the accompaniments of the two violins,
wherever most necessary.

In his report, afterwards read before the
Royal Society, Mr. Daines Barrington,
softened almost into adoration of the young
genius, attempts to illustrate the difficulties
which the child Mozart overcame in the
problem meant to entangle him. The
virtuoso compares it to a child eight years
old who should be asked to read five lines
of type simultaneously, the letters of the
alphabet having different powers in four
out of the five lines. It should further, he
says, be supposed that the five hypothetical
lines were not arranged under each other,
so as at all times to be read one under the
other, but often in a desultory manner.
The child was also to be imagined as reading,
at a coup d'Å“il, three different comments
on a five-lined speech: one, say, in Greek,
one in Hebrew, and the third in Etruscan.
The hypothetical child was also to be
presumed capable of pointing out, by signs as
he read, where one, or two, or three, of
these comments were material. This
elaborate and complicated simile, Mr.
Barrington caps by comparing the boy's efforts
to a child's who should, at the first glance,
read one of Shakespeare's finest speeches
with all the accuracy, pathos, and energy,
of a Garrick.

When the boy had finished the duet, he
expressed himself highly in approval, and
asked, with eagerness, whether Mr.
Barrington had any more such music? Mr.
Barrington, having heard that the child
was often visited with musical ideas, which
came upon him like an inspiration, and
which—as if he had suddenly been enabled
to hear the voices of angels inaudible to
others—he would even in the middle of the
night imitate on his harpsichord, told the
phenomenon's father that he should be glad
to hear some of his son's extemporaneous
compositions.

The father saw that the connoisseur was
won over, and now coquetted with him a
bit. He said it depended entirely on the
moment of inspiration, but that there was
no harm in asking the lad if he were in the
humour for a composition. In the mean
time the quaint child, like a changeling in
his grave and preternatural self-confidence,
went on at intervals running about the
room, and playing on the harpsichord, his
constant companion.

Mr. Barrington, after a moment's sapient
cogitation, remembered that little Mozart
had been much taken notice of by Manzolo,
a famous singer, who came over to England
in 1764. He therefore shrewdly leaned over
the keys, and said, in a courtly way, becoming
the ex-Marshal of the High Court of Admiralty,
that he would like to hear an extemporary
love song, such as his (Mozart's)
friend Manzolo would select for an opera.
The boy, turning on his high stool, gave a
look of childish archness, as much as to
say, "Love? Oh, I know the whole alphabet
of that singular passion," and immediately
began five or six lines of a jargon