ation. Louis Veuillot has been weighed in this
balance, and found wanting; and so has Janin prince of critics. With
Berlioz it is otherwise. If you are no musician he appeals to you as a
student of life; if you are interested in life and music both he is
irresistible. The _Memoires_ is one of the two or three essays in
artistic biography which may claim equal honours with Benvenuto's story
of himself and his own doings; the two volumes of correspondence rank
with the most interesting epistolary matter of these times; in the
_Grotesques_, the _A Travers Chants_, the _Soirees de l'Orchestre_ there
is enough of fun and earnest, of fine criticism and diabolical humour, of
wit and fancy and invention, to furnish forth a dozen ordinary critics,
and leave a rich remainder when all's done. These books have been
popular for years; they are popular still; and the reason is not far to
seek. Berlioz was not only a great musician and a brilliant writer; he
was also a very interesting and original human being. His writings are
one expression of an abnormal yet very natural individuality; and when he
speaks you are sure of something worth hearing and remembering.

A Prototype.

Apart from Cellini's ruffianism there are several points of contact
between the two men. Berlioz made the roaring goldsmith the hero of an
opera, and it is not doubtful that he was in complete sympathy with his
subject. In the Frenchman there is a full measure of the waywardness of
temper, the impatience of authority, the resolute and daring humour, the
passion of worship for what is great in art and of contempt for what is
little and bad, which entered so largely into the composition of the
Florentine. There is not much to choose between the Berlioz of the
_Debats_, the author of the _Grotesques de la Musique_ and the _A Travers
Chants_, and the Benvenuto who, as Il Lasca writes of him,

'Senza alcun ritegno o barbazzale
Delle cose malfatte dicea male.'

Benvenuto enlarges upon the joys of drawing from the life and expatiates
upon the greatness of Michelangelo in much the same spirit and with much
the same fury of admiration with which Berlioz descants upon the rapture
of conducting an orchestra and dilates upon the beauty of _Divinites du
Styx_ or the adagio of the so-called _Moonlight Sonata_. It is written
of Benvenuto, in connection with Vasari's attack upon that cupola of
Santa Maria del Fiore which himself was wont to call 'the