h_

John Ruskin
_After a photograph from life_

Herbert Spencer
_After a photograph from life_

Charles Robert Darwin
_After the painting by G. F. Watts, R.A._

John Ericsson
_From a contemporaneous engraving_

Li Hung Chang
_After a photograph from life_

David Livingstone
_After a photograph from life_

Sir Austen Henry Layard
_After the painting by H. W. Phillips_

Michael Faraday
_After a photograph from life_

Rudolf Virchow
_After a photograph from life_

BEACON LIGHTS OF HISTORY.

RICHARD WAGNER: MODERN MUSIC.

BY HENRY T. FINCK.

If the Dresden schoolboys who attended the _Kreuzschule_ in the years
1823-1827 could have been told that one of them was destined to be the
greatest opera composer of all times, and to influence the musicians of
all countries throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, they
would, no doubt, have been very much surprised. Nor is it likely that
they could have guessed which of them was the chosen one. For Richard
Wagner--or Richard Geyer, as he was then called, after his
stepfather--was by no means a youthful prodigy, like Mozart or Liszt. It
is related that Beethoven shed tears of displeasure over his first music
lessons; nevertheless, it was obvious from the beginning that he had a
special gift for music. Richard Wagner, on the other hand, apparently
had none. When he was eight years old his stepfather, shortly before his
death, heard him play on the piano two pieces from one of Weber's
operas, which made him wonder if Richard might "perhaps" have talent for
music. His piano teacher did not believe even in that "perhaps," but
told him bluntly he would "never amount to anything" as a musician.

For poetry, however, young Richard had a decided inclination in his
school years; and this was significant, inasmuch as it afterwards became
his cardinal maxim that in an opera "the play's the thing," and the
music merely a means of intensifying the emotional expression. Before
his time the music, or rather the singing of florid tunes, had been "the
thing," and the libretto merely a peg to hang these tunes on. In this
respect, therefore, the child was father to the man. At the age of
eleven he received a prize for the best poem on the death of a
schoolmate. At thirteen he translated the first twelve books of Homer's
Odyssey. He studied English for the sole purpose of being able to read
Shakspeare. Then he projected a stupendous trag