the situation created, the story, to be sure, being
made up to suit the madness of the hour. In the front line came the love
duets between tenor and soprano, with moon-light accompaniment; then
peasants' dances interrupted by thunder-storms, and drinking songs for
the baritone, backed by an approving chorus. And so on and on till the
tragedy business was reached: "Ye padre furioso e figlia infelice," as
Du Maurier calls them, when he relates his performance at Blankenberghe
"in imitation of his illustrious friend, Felix Bobtailo."

I must have been endowed with an extraordinary amount of boldness and
recklessness in those days, or I never could have given the great
maestro an insight into these my accomplishments. It came about in this
way:--

Conversation had turned on the curious practice which prevailed
formerly, to write the principal men's part in opera for an artificial
male soprano, and that led to my remarking that Rossini and his
contemporaries had done good service in banishing that incongruous
personage from the stage, but that they had still left undisturbed some
puzzling anomalies in the distribution of parts. There remained the fact
that a man has a tenor voice as long as he is a bachelor and a lover,
but, when he becomes a father, he develops into a basso profundo; and,
by way of pointing to another anomaly, I wanted to know why, when the
prim'uomo and the primadonna, with whose affections we so warmly
sympathised, have clandestinely met and resolved to fly from a tyrannic
parent, they should compromise their safety by singing a duet of
inordinate length: first warbling tender melodies, then shouting stern
resolves, practising scales, shakes, and dangerous runs to illustrate
the course of true love, and finally proclaiming their immutable
determination to live and die together, in strains so wild and so
powerfully backed by all the brass instruments of the orchestra, that
the irate father is invariably brought on to the stage, naturally to
wreck the lovers' fondest hopes.

By way of illustrating my meaning, I struck a chord or two, and did my
worst in imitation of the lovers' cadenza, and more specially of the
effect produced by overpowering brass instruments. That led to further
developments, my brass gained me the maestro's sympathies, and of these
he gave me a tangible proof in the shape of a composition.

I never much cared to make a collection of autographs, but I treasure
the album I have previo