d Signora
Cantilena come before or after Madame Pianota? Singers to be sure are
entitled to most consideration. They are invariably affected by the
weather, whilst the pianists are only out of practice. If I want la
Signora to sing at about eleven o'clock, I begin asking her to favour us
at a quarter-past ten, allowing her from forty to fifty minutes to get
over the insurmountable difficulties which, just to-day, stand in the
way of her acceding to my request. But then, in the kindness of her
heart, when once she begins, she is inclined to go on till she has
successfully illustrated the wonderful variety of her talent. And there
is Heir Thumpen Krasch, who is waiting all the while to get to the
piano, and when he is there, he is naturally disinclined to play his
best pieces first, and reserves his Monster-Rhapsody on Wagner's
Trilogy, the success of the season, for what I call the after-end. As
for myself, I forget my duties and go into raptures, delighted as I am
to think that my friends sing and play their best in the genial
atmosphere of the Studio. But oh, the other virtuosi who are waiting to
be heard! "_Ote-toi, que je m'y mette_" is the motto of every true
artist, and my friends are all true artists.

"Yes," said Sir James, "those troubles are as old as the hills. Don't
you recollect the lines Horace wrote two thousand years ago?" and he
quoted them.

"Splendid! I wish you would write them down for me; my Latin is rather
rusty, and I should like to remember them."

So he wrote:--

HORACE, 3RD SATIRE.

"Omnibus hoc vitium
Est cantoribus, inter amicos
Ut nunquam inducant
Animum cantare
rogati
Injussi nunquam
desistant."

The same day Browning came in, and seeing the lines, he took up a pen
and wrote without pausing to think--

"All sorts of singers have this common vice:
To sing 'mid friends you have to ask them twice!
If you don't ask them, that's another thing:
Until the judgment-day be sure they'll sing!

--_Impromptu Translation_, July 10, '83."

How rapidly his mind worked I had occasional opportunities of
witnessing. He would let us give him a number of rhymes, perhaps twenty
or thirty, to be embodied in an impromptu poem. This he would read to us
just once, and, as he spoke the last words, he would ruthlessly tear it
up into small fragments and scatter them to the winds. Nothing would
induce him to stay his iconoclastic ha