reotype of Paganini taken when he was forty
years of age. No one ever asked this man, "Kind sir, are you anybody in
particular?"

Paganini was tall and wofully slim. His hands and feet were large and
bony, his arms long, his form bowed and lacking in all that we call
symmetry. But the long face with its look of abject melancholy, the
curved nose, the thin lips and the sharp, protruding chin, made a
combination that Fate has never duplicated. You could easily believe
that this man knew all the secrets of the Nether World, and had tasted
the joys of Paradise as well. Women pitied and loved him, men feared
him, and none understood him. He lived in the midst of throngs and
multitudes--the loneliest man known in the history of art.

Paganini, when he had reached his height, played only his own music; he
played divinely and incomprehensibly; next to his passion for music was
his greed for gold. These three facts sum up all we really know about
the master--the rest fades off into mist--mystery, fable and legend. We
do know, however, that he composed several pieces of music so difficult
that he could not play them himself, and of course no one else can.
Imagination can always outrun performance. Paganini had no close
friends; no confidants: he never mingled in society, and he never
married.

At times he would disappear from the public gaze for several months,
and not even his business associates knew where he was. On one such
occasion a traveler discovered him in a monastic retreat in the Swiss
Mountains, wearing a horsehair robe and a rope girdle; others saw him
disguised as a mendicant; and still another tells of finding him working
as a day-laborer with obscure and ignorant peasants. Then there are
tales told of how he was taken captive by a titled lady of great wealth
and beauty, who carried him away to her bower, where he eschewed the
violin and tinkled only the guitar the livelong day.

Everywhere the report was current that Paganini had killed a man, and
been sentenced to prison for life. The story ran that in prison he found
an old violin, three strings of which were broken, and so he played on
one string, producing such ravishing music that the keepers feared he
was "possessed." They decided they must get rid of him, and so contrived
to have him thrown overboard from a galley; but he swam ashore, and
although he was everywhere known, no man dared place a hand on him.

A late writer in a London magazine, however, h