But in nothing have the freaks of preference
been stranger than in this world through which
we are wandering. Hermione and Leontes,
Florizel and Perdita, have been left untouched as
opera characters, though a more delicious subject
for music hardly exists than The Winter's Tale.
Had Mendelssohn lived, he was strongly inclined
to make the attempt. As matters stand, the
play was the other day decked with music for
the German stage, from the feeble hand of M.
von Flotow. Then, As You Like It, though
spoiled for the French theatre by Madame George
Sand, who hardily invented a new catastrophe,
has been left alone, save by Arne and Bishop
(of whom more anon), though in that delicious
play are groups and contrasts wooing to the
musician. On the other hand, it only the other
day occurred to that perverse man of talent, M.
Berlioz, to make a Shakespeare opera as well
as a Shakespeare symphony; and his choice
fell, with characteristic perversity, on a comedy
than which hardly a more unsuitable one for
his purpose could be name—Much Ado About
Nothing.

A hundred good reasons could be given why
there is no possible representation of wit in
music. See how the aroma of Beaumarchais's
brilliant dialogue has failed to penetrate the
music of Mozart's Figaro, which is seriously
sentimental; and Figaro has situations for the
four principal characters for which the keen
encounter of Benedick with Lady Disdain finds
no place. Their ringing game with foils (those
their sharp tongues) cannot be told in music.
Take it away, and they are little more than a
walking gentleman and lady. " Nothing," wrote
an acute German critic, "lies further from
music than irony." And hence, if there were
no reason beyond, the work proves a piece of
weak and elaborate pedantry; and the story, in
the attempt to make it comic, has been patched
by a character in the most faded style of Italian
buffoonery—pitiful heavy substitute for the
delights of Dogberry and Verges. The music is,
for the most part, in the ambitious yet entangled
manner of M. Berlioz, just now characterised;
but it contains one duet of exceptional beauty,
in a superfluous scene: a night-piece for Hero
and " her gentlewoman"—added by the strangely
enthusiastic student of Shakespeare. It is one
of the oddest inconsistencies occurring in the
story of the most inconsistent of the acts
(which music, indeed, is), that one whose fancies
are so weak and embroiled, and whose forms
are such heaps of confusion and disproportion,
should have had " a flash" (to use Sydney
Smith's word) of such beauty, simplicity, and
tender clearness, as are to be found in this
exquisite duet. The spirit of the scene where
Lorenzo and Jessica " out-night" each other in
verse, whose music defies music, breathes in
this charming composition. There is nothing
like it from the same pen.

With the above, we arrive at the end of the
list of operas suggested by Shakespeare's plays,
and also of the most important illustrations to
them. But these do not make up one-half of
the mass of music to which he has given occasion,
in the form of settings of his songs or
passages of poetry. Anything like enumeration
of them is utterly out of the question. Some of
the happiest only can be mentioned.

A jewel in the enormous cabinet is Haydn's
canzonet " She never told her love," one of the
happiest examples of accompanied recitative in
being—perhaps the most expressive of his most
expressive compositions—those, we mean, which
owe their creation to the influence of English
seriousness on the light-hearted and skilful
musician. That he was deepened and enlarged as
a poet by his residence in London, there is ample
evidence, and he had that youngest of natures
which never rests self-content, but is willing to
learn, to gather, to adopt. He was set on fire
by hearing the works of Handel in England,
when he was an elderly man, and thence
came The Creation. The discoveries of the
youngster, Mozart, exciled him, if not to alter,
to enrich his style, as his latest stringed quartets
(there are some eighty in all!) attest. For
so cheerful, so vain a man, so easily contented,
moreover, with little pleasures, so circled by
friends and patrons, there was a remarkable
amount of honesty in Haydn: the truest artistic
spirit. Possibly Shakespeare's words were
suggested to him by that showy lady, Mrs. John
Hunter, whose musical parties, we have been
told, so discomposed her husband, the redoubtable
anatomist, but who was no bad writer of
verse for music. In any case, he set them once
for all.

So, again, it would not be a wise proceeding
in any song-writer and new, to handle " Hark,
hark, the lark," with such perfection have those
words been set by Francis Schubert (an English
lady has reverently added a second verse). It is
among the half-dozen best Shakespearian songs
in being: and in this country has entirely superseded
Doctor Cooke's pretty but shallow glee.
The true lyric spirit has hardly been ever more
picturesquely manifested than in the young,
fertile, unequal, Viennese composer. There is
nothing more utterly pertinent than his treatment
of Scott's " Ave Maria," save it be this
matin song. It may be commemorated, that
never has this been sung with such exquisite
freshness, delicacy, and relish, as by one of a
great dramatic family, the last of the Kembles!
By its side, Schubert's "Who is Sylvia?" is
tame and characterless.

Arne must be named once again, as having
written one of the best English songs existing, in
his " Blow, blow, thou winter's wind." There is
a careless, open-air pathos in that tune; a forest
tone, and yet a court grace, not to be excelled.
"Arden Wood" is in it, if there be such a thing
as scenery, and spirit, and colour in music. No
one sings it now-a-days, however; perhaps
because no one can sing it. A conformable
Amiens is not an every-day person. Of all
Arne's Shakespearian melodies, this is assuredly
the best.

Then, Bishop's Shakespeare songs demand
yet a few words, in addition to those already