gh he
exercised but little supervision over the studies of the young men under
his nominal charge. Berlioz did very much as he pleased--studied little
or much as the whim seized him, visited the churches, studios, and
picture-galleries, and spent no little of his time by starlight and
sunlight roaming about the country adjacent to the Holy City in search
of adventures. He had soon come to the conclusion that he had not much
to learn of Italian music; that he could teach rather than be taught. He
speaks of Roman art with the bitterest scorn, and Wagner himself never
made a more savage indictment of Italian music than does Berlioz in his
"Memoires." At the theatres he found the orchestra, dramatic unity, and
common-sense all sacrificed to mere vocal display. At St. Peter's and
the Sistine Chapel religious earnestness and dignity were frittered away
in pretty part-singing, in mere frivolity and meretricious show. The
word "symphony" was not known except to indicate an indescribable
noise before the rising of the curtain. Nobody had heard of Weber and
Beethoven, and Mozart, dead more than a score of years, was mentioned by
a well-known musical connoisseur as a young man of great promise! Such
surroundings as these were a species of purgatory to Berlioz, against
whose bounds he fretted and raged without intermission. The director's
receptions were signalized by the performance of insipid cavatinas, and
from these, as from his companions' revels in which he would sometimes
indulge with the maddest debauchery as if to kill his own thoughts, he
would escape to wander in the majestic ruins of the Coliseum and see the
magic Italian moonlight shimmer through its broken arches, or stroll on
the lonely Campagna till his clothes were drenched with dew. No fear of
the deadly Roman malaria could check his restless excursions, for, like
a fiery horse, he was irritated to madness by the inaction of his life.
To him the _dolce far niente_ was a meaningless phrase. His comrades
scoffed at him and called him "_Pere la Joie_," in derision of the
fierce melancholy which despised them, their pursuits and pleasures.

At the end of the year he was obliged to present, something before
the Institute as a mark of his musical advancement, and he sent on a
fragment of his "Mass" heard years before at St. Roch, in which the wise
judges professed to find the "evidences of material advancement, and the
total abandonment of his former reprehensible tenden