performance of my mother's, when--in
some musical arrangement of "Blue Beard" (by Kelly or Storace, I think),
in the part of Sister Anne--she waved and signaled and sang from the
castle wall, "I see them galloping! I see them galloping!" after a very
different fashion, that drew shouts of sympathetic applause from her
hearers.

Miss Paton married Lord William Lennox, was divorced from her husband
and married Mr. Wood, and pursued her career as a public singer for many
years successfully after this event; nor was her name in any way again
made a subject of public animadversion, though she separated herself
from Mr. Wood, and at one time was said to have entertained thoughts of
going into a Roman Catholic nunnery. Her singing was very admirable, and
her voice one of the finest in quality and compass that I ever heard.
The effects she produced on the stage were very remarkable, considering
the little intellectual power or cultivation she appeared to possess. My
father's expression of "an inspired idiot," though wrung from him by the
irritation of momentary annoyance, was really not inapplicable to her.
She sang with wonderful power and pathos her native Scotch ballads, she
delivered with great purity and grandeur the finest soprano music of
Handel, and though she very nearly drove poor Weber mad with her
apparent want of intelligence during the rehearsals of his great opera,
I have seldom heard any thing finer than her rendering of the difficult
music of the part of Reiza, from beginning to end, and especially the
scene of the shipwreck, with its magnificent opening recitative, "Ocean,
thou mighty monster!"

"Oberon" was brought out and succeeded; but in a degree so far below the
sanguine expectations of all concerned, that failure itself, though more
surprising, would hardly have been a greater disappointment than the
result achieved at such a vast expenditure of money, time, and labor.
The expectations of the public could not have been realized by any work
which was to be judged by comparison with their already permanent
favorite, "Der Freyschuetz." No second effort could have seemed any thing
but second-best, tried by the standard of that popular production; and
whatever judgment musicians and connoisseurs might pronounce as to the
respective merits of the two operas, the homely test of the "proof of
the pudding" being "in the eating" was decidedly favorable to the
master's earlier work; and my own opinion is, that eit