r who had
owned it. The stupid messenger, arriving at home, betrayed to the
husband what it was he had been charged to deliver, and the husband
chose a most mediaeval revenge: he had the heart of the troubadour
cooked and placed before his wife. When she had eaten, he told her what
sweetmeat it was she had so relished. Thereafter, she starved herself
to death. The same story is told of the troubadour Guillem de
Cabestanh; but it is good enough to repeat.

There was another old troubadour, Pierre Vidal, of whom an ancient
biographer wrote that he "sang better than any man in the world, and
was one of the most foolish men who ever lived, for he believed
everything to be just as it pleased him and as he would have it be."
But the biographer contradicted his own beautiful portrait by telling
how poor Pierre sang once too well to a married woman, whose husband
took him, jailed him, and pierced his linnet tongue.

MARTIN LUTHER

If we cannot omit these troubadours, how can we overlook Martin Luther,
whose musical attainments the skeptics are wont to minimise, as others
deny his claim to that magnificent ejaculation: "Who loves not wine,
women, and song remains a fool his whole life long." No one claims that
Luther wrote his own compositions, but that he dictated them to trained
musicians who wrote down, and then wrote up such melodies as he played
upon the flute. But whatsoever may be the truth of his position as a
composer, no one can deny him either a passion for music or a domestic
romance. The runaway monk told the truth, when he said: "I married a
runaway nun."

When he was forty-one, with his connivance, a number of nuns fled, or
were abducted, from a convent. One of them, Catherina von Bora, found
an asylum in Luther's own home. After looking about for a good husband
for her, at the end of a year he married her himself. She was then
twenty-six years old. The married life of the jovial reformer was
happy; but when he died, he left her so poor that she was obliged to
take in boarders, until she met her death by the same means that had
brought her marriage,--a runaway.

BRITISHERS

The earlier English composers have not been without their heart
interests. We have already pried into Purcell's romance. Old John Bull,
at the age of forty-four, could give up his professorship to marry
"Elizabeth Walker, of the Strand, maiden, being about twenty-four,
daughter of ---- Walker, citizen of London, deceased, she attending