chorus so mercilessly over–worked and the
chorus is required to show courteous behaviour
itself and act, as well as to sing by memory
some of the most difficult music ever written,—
at all events, before the excruciating abominations
of Herr Wagner were engendered.

The present attempt is merely one to mark a
few characteristics—and thus it would be
superfluous to follow the course of this superb
historical musical drama step by step:—the more
so, because all its dramatic combinations are as
familiar to us as the great scenes of
Shakespeare.—Its intensely French colour may,
however, be illustrated once again. The chamber
scene between Raoul and Valentine in the fourth
act (never to be thought of without a memorial
word of gratitude to Mario and Grisi), is, with
all its resistless power, as national as that noble
and awful painted tragic scene—the Murder of
the Duke de Guise, by Paul Delaroche.—The
fifth act, though the most ambitious, is the
weakest of the work: but, save in his "Robert,"
its maker always exhausted himself before the
charm was wound up. The fifth act of "Le
Prophète," with its historical bravura for the
distressed mother, and the song at the final
orgie, after the fashion of Sardanapalus (note
by note, on the theme of the Paddy Carey,
whose

Cheeks like thumping red potatoes

have long been the delight of Dublin boys and
girls), is almost absurd in its weakness.—The
trio of the voice and two flutes, which closes
"L'Etoile," written to accommodate the flute–
like Mdlle. Jenny Lind, is a piece of unmeaning
display. The whole last act of "Le Pardon de
Plöermel," where the distraught maiden, after
being insensible since midnight, is brought, by
full daylight (wet from a weir, to boot), restored
to her wits, to be married out of hand with a
ready–made hymn, and a lovely ready–prepared
canopy, is an excrescence of utter silliness, which
would have doomed for ever one less strong,
with all his unsurpassable weaknesses, than
Meyerbeer.

The compound of force and feebleness could
not be completer, in its incompleteness, than in
and throughout the artistic history of this
trembling, ambitious, successful, mean,
generous man.

Among all those who have won an universal
reputation in dramatic music, Meyerbeerwas the most
timid, the most insecure as to his own purposes,
with all his gigantic notions of effect. His operas
were not so much written as stuck together, bit
by bit, while the rehearsals of them were going
on.—If a machinist under a paper cap crossed
the stage, and made some irreverent remark on
the length of this scene—or that other procession
—the composer shrank up, faltered, held
council on the matter,—and, after having been
inexorable in his first pretensions, conceded,
with a humility which became ignoble, in regard
to the man under the paper cap. He did not
know what his effects were to be, or where they
were to be made, but went on trying, contriving,
and. like the bird that builds a nest, bringing,
here a straw,—there a bit of wool,—anon, a
fragment of wood, or stone,—and, in the end,
building not so much a nest, as a habitation for
musical drama.

No stone was left unturned by him to
procure—one might better say to force—a success.
It may be questioned whether so skilful an
artist ever existed, who employed with so
elaborate a patience every machinery of compliment
and cajolery as he did. He prepared for
the first representations of his operas by paying
money right and left, with an anxiety humiliating
to think of, and on a scale of expense impossible
to anyother who had not an ample private fortune.
No ante–chamber was too mean for him to be willing
to wait in it, provided the master of the house
had the slightest shred of influence on press or
public. He shared Sir Robert Walpole's opinion
that every man has his price—and would return
to attempt and to tempt every imaginable
assistance with a pertinacity nothing short of
whimsical, but which was rather distressing to
be exposed to. The Boulevard des Italiens, a
sort of French Rialto for musical rumour,
streamed with tales of his expedients, months
before his operas were painfully born. One
year, said rumour, Meyerbeer had been buying
up all the stage organs, to prevent his new organ
effect being forestalled. There was a later
tale how he had connived to the crippling of
the organ at the Grand Opéra, when the same
was to help a great scene in Nieodemeyri's
"Stradella."—Another year, would come
simmering stories of pilot–banquets after the
fashion of Lucullus (and well did Meyerbeer
understand the art of dining, till ill
health, and with it hypochondria, claimed
him).—He had no objection to bespeaking opera–
books at munificent prices, from the men of
feuilleton, home or foreign, though it did not
follow that the books were to be set. I can
speak to his face of puzzled inquietude, when
one of the fraternity ventured to decline a
commission for such a piece of work—in its very
purpose, and by its very essence, unproducible.
Though he harassed every one during his
rehearsals to the point of exasperation, by at first
refusing the smallest concession, when the hour
of performance drew nigh he was seized with a
cowering terror, which would yield or admit
any change. Music lasting one hour and a
quarter was cut out of "Le Prophète" within a
very few weeks of its production:—and its great
situation—the one of fascination, in the fourth
or Cathedral act, would have possibly shared
the same fate, had not Madame Viardot, the
original Fides, backed by Ary Scheffer (how all
this comes back like a thing of yesterday!),
pleaded to be allowed to show what could be
represented by such an actress in such a
situation.

The, music and the man were one.—Having
made himself altogether French, to the point of
producing all his best works in France (for his
"Vielka," written for Berlin as a court
command to a composer with a court appointment,