the gods, and furnish him an opportunity for making some of the
startling effects of lyrical declamation which never failed to carry his
audience by storm.

No singer ever delivered with greater purity or nobler breadth Handel's
majestic music; the masterly simplicity of his execution of all really
fine compositions was worthy of his first-rate powers; but the desire of
obtaining by easier and less elevated means the acclamations of his
admirers seemed irresistible to him, and "Scots wha hae," with the
flourish of his stick in the last verse, was a sure triumph which he
never disdained. Weber expressed unbounded astonishment and contempt at
this unartistic view of things, and with great reluctance at length
consented to suppress, or rather transfer to the overture, the noble and
pathetic melody designed for Huon's opening song, for which he submitted
the fine warlike cantata beginning--

"Oh,'tis a glorious sight to see
The charge of the Christian chivalry!"

in which, to be sure, Braham charged with the Christians, and routed the
Paynims, and mourned for the wounded, and wept for the dead, and
returned in triumph to France in the joyous cabaletta, with wonderful
dramatic effect, such as, no doubt, the other song would never have
enabled him to produce. But the success of the song did not reconcile
Weber to what he considered the vulgarity and inappropriateness of its
subject, and the circumstance lowered his opinion both of the English
singer and of the English public very grievously.

How well I remember all the discussions of those prolonged, repeated,
anxious, careful rehearsals, and the comical despair of which Miss
Paton, the heroine of the opera, was the occasion to all concerned, by
the curious absence of dramatic congruity of gesture and action which
she contrived to combine with the most brilliant and expressive
rendering of the music. In the great shipwreck scene, which she sang
magnificently, she caught up the short end of a sash tied around her
waist, and twirled it about without unfastening it, by way of signaling
from the top of a rock for help from a distant vessel, the words she
sang being, "Quick, quick, for a signal this scarf shall be _waved_!"
This performance of hers drew from my father the desperate exclamation,
"That woman's an inspired idiot!" while Weber limped up and down the
room silently wringing his hands, and Sir George Smart went off into
ecstatic reminiscences of a certain