nt of the world. The last round of the ladder is not yet
reached. To Madame Morlot, Harriette is a savage, une bete, without
cultivation. "Oh, the dismal little fright! a thousand years of study
would be useless; go, scour the floors; she has positively no voice."
No voice, Madame Morlot? Harriette, no voice,--who burst every ear-drum
in the room last night with her howling and hooting, and made the
stoutest heart tremble with fearful forebodings of what might come
next? But Madame Morlot is not infallible, for Herr Driesbach sits
shivering at the dreadful noises which Madame Morlot extorts from his
sensitive and suffering piano, and at the necessity which lies upon him
to go and congratulate her upon her performance. Ah! if his tortured
conscience might but congratulate her and himself upon its close! And
so the scale ascends. Hills on hills and Alps on Alps arise, and who
shall mount the ultimate peak till all the world shall say, "Here
reigns the Excellence"? I listen with pleasure to untutored Nancie
till Anabella takes all the wind from her sails. I think the force of
music can no further go than Madame Morlot, and, behold, Herr Driesbach
has knocked out that underpinning. I am bewildered, and I say,
helplessly, "What shall I admire and be a la mode?" But if it is so
disheartening to me, who am only a passive listener, what must be the
agonies of the dramatis personae? "Hang it!" says Charles Lamb, "how
I like to be liked, and what I do to be liked!" And do Nancie,
Harriette, and Herr Driesbach like it any less? What shall avenge them
for their spretae injuria formae? What can repay the hapless
performer, who has performed her very best, for learning by terrible,
indisputable indirections that her cherished and boasted Cremona is but
a very second fiddle?

So, standing on the high ground of certain immunity from criticism and
hostile judgment, I do not so much console myself as I do not stand in
need of consolation. I rather give thanks for my mute and necessarily
unoffending lips, and I shall go in great good-humor to Camilla's
concert.

There are many different ways of going to a concert. You can be one of
a party of fashionable people to whom music is a diversion, a pastime,
an agreeable change from the assembly or the theatre. They applaud,
they condemn, they criticise. They know all about it. Into such
company as this, even I, whose poor old head is always getting itself
wedged in where i