uck, born
Pergin. She was a good Christian, and without ostentation a mother to
the poor. She was loved and cherished by all who knew her."

ROUSSEAU THE CONFESSOR

During the fierce battles Gluck fought in Paris, one of his most ardent
partisans was Jean Jacques Rousseau, who was a musician in a small way,
wrote songs, an enormously successful opera, "Le Devin du Village," and
other musical works, besides making an attempt to reform musical
notation, and writing a dictionary of music. The world, however, does
not accept him as a musician but as a writer, and his numerous and
curious love affairs are told in so much detail in his immortal
"Confessions," that I cannot attempt to treat them here. Vandam, in his
book on "Great Amours," dissects Rousseau's heart ruthlessly. For his
ability to do this, he must thank Rousseau most, for the unequalled
frankness of his own biography, Francis Greble, dissecting "Rousseau's
first love," has neatly dubbed him "the Great High Priest of those who
kiss and tell."

THE AMIABLE PICCINNI

In this same war of operatic schools and composers which raged in Paris
upon the reforms of Gluck, the Italian composer Piccinni was haled to
the front as an unwilling opponent of Gluck.

The world is needlessly cruel to those who happen to interfere in any
way with the favourites of posterity, and Piccinni's name is a byword in
the history of music. We hear much of the unscrupulous opposition that
his partisans made to the reforms of Gluck, but we should also take into
consideration the unscrupulous opposition that the partisans of Gluck
made to the prosperity and honest endeavours of Piccinni, a man of no
mean talent, whose misfortune and not whose fault it was, that he was
not a genius of the first order.

But we are not concerned here with the history of music, only with the
intimate history of musicians. Piccinni's domestic life was so
beautiful, that it makes it all the more pitiable that he should have
been dragged willy-nilly into a contest for which he had neither
inclination nor ability. Piccinni fell in love with a pupil, like him an
Italian, Vicenza Sibilla. When he was twenty-eight he married her. His
biographer Ginguene says: "She joined to the charms of her sex, a most
beautiful and touching voice. All that happy disposition, assiduous
study under so good a master could accomplish, especially when teacher
and pupil loved each other passionately, and were equally impassioned
f