the text are sometimes by the author,
sometimes by the editor. I have occasionally (but not always) marked
the distinction; where, however, this is omitted, the ingenuity of the
reader will be rarely at fault.

ZANONI.

BOOK I. -- THE MUSICIAN.

Due Fontane
Chi di diverso effeto hanno liquore!

"Ariosto, Orland. Fur." Canto 1.7.

(Two Founts
That hold a draught of different effects.)

CHAPTER 1.I.

Vergina era
D' alta belta, ma sua belta non cura:
....
Di natura, d' amor, de' cieli amici
Le negligenze sue sono artifici.

"Gerusal. Lib.," canto ii. xiv.-xviii.

(She was a virgin of a glorious beauty, but regarded not her
beauty...Negligence itself is art in those favoured by Nature, by
love, and by the heavens.)

At Naples, in the latter half of the last century, a worthy artist named
Gaetano Pisani lived and flourished. He was a musician of great genius,
but not of popular reputation; there was in all his compositions
something capricious and fantastic which did not please the taste of the
Dilettanti of Naples. He was fond of unfamiliar subjects into which he
introduced airs and symphonies that excited a kind of terror in those
who listened. The names of his pieces will probably suggest their
nature. I find, for instance, among his MSS., these titles: "The Feast
of the Harpies," "The Witches at Benevento," "The Descent of Orpheus
into Hades," "The Evil Eye," "The Eumenides," and many others
that evince a powerful imagination delighting in the fearful and
supernatural, but often relieved by an airy and delicate fancy with
passages of exquisite grace and beauty. It is true that in the selection
of his subjects from ancient fable, Gaetano Pisani was much more
faithful than his contemporaries to the remote origin and the early
genius of Italian Opera.

That descendant, however effeminate, of the ancient union between Song
and Drama, when, after long obscurity and dethronement, it regained a
punier sceptre, though a gaudier purple, by the banks of the Etrurian
Arno, or amidst the lagunes of Venice, had chosen all its primary
inspirations from the unfamiliar and classic sources of heathen legend;
and Pisani's "Descent of Orpheus" was but a bolder, darker, and more
scientific repetition of the "Euridice" which Jacopi Peri set to music
at the august nuptials of Henry of Navarre and Mary of Medicis.* Still,
as I have said, th