onsign the whole of the principal in his behalf; and in order
to avert serious consequences, and to procure peace, he gave up the
greater part of it.

It was early in 1828 when Paganini arrived at Vienna, where he gave
a great many concerts with a success equal, if not superior, to any
which had hitherto attended his exertions. His performance excited the
admiration and astonishment of all the most distinguished professors and
connoisseurs of this critical city. With any of the former all idea of
competition was hopeless; and their greatest violinist, Mayseder, as
soon as he had heard him, with an ingenuousness which did him honour,
as we ourselves have reason to know, wrote to a friend in London, that
he might now lock up his violin whenever he liked.

In estimating the labour which it must have cost a performer like
Paganini to have arrived at such transcendent excellence, people are
often apt to err in their calculations as to the actual extent of
time and practice which has been devoted to its acquisition. That the
perfect knowledge of the _mechanique_ of the instrument which his
performance exhibits, and his almost incredible skill and dexterity
in its management must necessarily have been the result of severe
discipline, is beyond all question; but more, much more, in every case
of this kind, is to be ascribed to the system upon which that discipline
has proceeded, and to the genius and enthusiasm of the artist. The
miraculous powers of Paganini in the opinion of his auditors were not
to be accounted for in the ordinary way. To them, it was plain that they
must have sprung from a life of a much more settled and secluded cast
than that of an itinerant Italian musical professor. It was equally
clear, from his wild, haggard, and mysterious looks, that he was no
ordinary personage, and had seen no common vicissitudes. The vaults of
a dungeon accordingly were the local habitation which public rumour, in
its love of the marvellous, seemed unanimously to assign to him, as the
only place where "the mighty magic" of his bow could possibly have been
acquired. Then, as to the delinquency which led to his incarceration,
there were various accounts: some imputed it to his having been a
captain of banditti; others, only a carbonaro; some to his having killed
a man in a duel; but the more current and generally received story was,
that he had stabbed or poisoned his wife, or, as some said, his
mistress; although, as fame had asc