overstrained, possibly under some false
unexpressed notions of nationality and truth—
certainly owing to education on mistaken
principles. Madame Schroeder was a crude
and exaggerated singer of the music of Gluck
—but, as Agatha and Euryanthe, she has left
her own royal mark on the recollection of every
one who has heard and seen her.

Were one to speculate on the influences of
disorder in youth, as shown in Weber's
indifference to proportion, climax, animation in
his opera-books, it would be easy to become super-
subtle. After all, what opera composer is there
who could be named (save Gluck, or, with a long
interval, Bellini) that seems to have exercised
much prescient and poetical judgment of the
tale he was to treat? It has been, here, a bit of
costume, there, a solitary situation, which have
seduced the strong, the weak, the careful, the
careless, to waste their time, and energy, and
melody, and counterpoint. And the wonder is,
not that so few operas survive, but that so many
have come to light, and have enjoyed a life of
popularity.

Think of these things what we may, Weber
created a school of opera-writers in Germany.
Only one of these, however, is worth naming
in a chapter which does not profess to do the
duty of an article in an Encyclopædia; this is
Marschner, in whose operas every defect of
Weber's style is brought out—the unlovely,
preposterous strain on the voices, the making
shift of getting over an awkward passage by
crude harmonic progressions,—and yet who had
in himself a grain of individual fancy and invention.
His " Templar and Jewess," a version
of "Ivanhoe," shows as much. Had he been
less harsh, jealous, less occupied by those
miserable petty cares and rivalries which make
German court appointments not like so many
beds of roses, as to " Damien's bed of
steel," Marschner might have extricated
himself into originality; for in all music—in
opera music especially—originality can be
gained by labour, thought, and constant
experience.

With Marschner's name this small chronicle
comes to a stop, since in sketching the story of
German opera there is no need to dwell on the
slighter productions—not light in substance
though in seeming—of the doleful jokers who
have tried to make German comic opera.
Nicolai's " Merry Wives of Windsor" is the
best and most enduring specimen, but there is
not a dream of Germany in it. It is half French,
half Italian.

Nor is there need to discuss the glories and
influences of Meyerbeer, because all these
return (da capo) to the grand opera of France,
and because Meyerbeer cannot by any magic
be accepted as a German composer of opera,
and is now repudiated by them.

The nightmares imposed on a helpless and
astray public by Herr Wagner, may be "left
alone in their glory"—for the moment at least.
What manner of influence they have had, was to
be heard last autumn in the horrible music
of the Carlsruhe Festival, described in these
columns. We imagine it to be already
decaying.

THE FIT OF AILSIE'S SHOE.

CHAPTER I.

ON a certain mellow August afternoon an old
woman was travelling along the sea-girt road
between Portrush and Dunluce. She wore a
long grey cloak, and a scarlet neckerchief thrown
over her white cap. Her face was unusually
sallow and wrinkled, with small, shrewd, furtive
eyes. She carried a stick, and halted now and
then from fatigue.

She looked often from right to left, and from
left to right, over the sea, heaving helplessly
under its load of blazing brooding glory, and
inland, over the stretches of green and golden,
where cattle drowsed and corn ripened. She
seemed like one not assured of her way, and
looking for landmarks. Presently she stopped
by some boys who were playing marbles under
a hedge to ask whereabouts might stand the
house of one James MacQuillan.

"Is it Jamie's you want?" said the eldest
lad; " there it's, up the hill yonder, with its
shoulder agin the haystack. But if you're goin'
there, I'll tell you that Ailsie's out at the fair.
Mother saw her pass our door at sunrise this
mornin'."

From the way he gave his information, the
urchin evidently thought that, Ailsie being from
home, it was worth no one's while to climb the
hill to Jamie's. Noway staggered in her purpose
by the news, however, the old woman proceeded
on her travels, and took her way to the haystack.

She plodded up a green-hedged lonan, and
emerged from it on a causeway of round stones
bedded in clay. Here stood " Jamie's," a white
cottage smothered in fuchsia-trees. There was
a sweet scent of musk and sitherwood hanging
about, and a wild rose was nailed against the
gable. A purple pigeon was cooing on the
russet thatch, and a lazy cloud of smoke was
reluctantly mingling its blue vapour with the
yellow evening air. Overtopping the chimney
there rose a golden cock of new-made hay. The
old woman snuffed the fragrant breath of the
place, poked at the fuchsia-bushes with her
stick, and peered all about her with her shrewd
bright eyes. At last she approached the open
door and looked across the threshold.

There was a small room with a clay floor, a
fire winking on the hearth almost blinded out
by the sun, a spinning-wheel in the corner, an
elderly woman knitting beside the window, and
a check-curtained bed standing in the corner, in
which a sickly man sat up with a newspaper
spread on his knees.

"God save all here!" said the visitor, pushing
in her head at the door. " An' is this Jamie
MacQuillan's?"

"As sure as my name's Jamie," said the
weakly man, taking off his spectacles. " Take
a seat, ma'am. You'd be a thraveller maybe,
comin' home from the fair?"