But I am, perhaps, talking at random on this subject, for I must confess, that this Serva Maestra, with Italian singing, gives me more pleasure, and especially a more inward pleasure, than all the operas of the very modern Paer put together..

If we are right in our remarks on that part of music which soonest feels the effects of time, Haydn may expect a longer life than any other composer. He has displayed his genius in the harmony, that is to say, in the durable part.

I give you the following quotation from the Spectator, that is, from a very rational

writer :

"Recitative music, in every language, should be as different as the tone, or accent, of each language; for, otherwise, what may properly express a passion in one language, will not do it in another. Every one, who has been long in Italy, knows very well that the cadences, in their Reci tativo, are only the accents of their language, made more musical and tuneful.

"Thus the notes of interrogation, or admiration, in the Italian music, are not unlike

the ordinary tones of an English voice, when we are angry: insomuch, that I have often seen our audiences extremely mistaken, as to what has been doing on the stage, and expecting to see the hero knock down his messenger, when he has been asking him a question; or fancying that he quarrels with his friend, when he only bids him good-morrow." SPECTATOR, No. 29.

Music, which acts upon the imagination, has a more intimate relation, than painting for instance, to the peculiar organization of the individual. If it gratifies him, it is by causing his fancy to present to him certain agreeable images. His heart, disposed to tenderness, by the actual pleasure he receives from the sweetness of the sounds, delights in these images, enjoys the felicity they present to him, with an ardour which he would not experience at any other time. Now it is evident that these images must be different, according to the different imaginations which produce them. What can be more opposite than a fat, well-fed German, fresh and fair, drinking beer, and eating bread and butter all day; and a dark,

.

brown Italian, thin almost to leanness, with sallow complexion, and eye of fire, living on coffee, and other slender and sober diet? How can the same thing be expected to please beings so dissimilar, speaking languages so totally different from each other? They cannot possibly have the same abstract idea of beauty. If the rhetoricians will insist that there is an ideal beauty common to both, the pleasure, produced by what these two persons equally admire, will be necessarily very faint. They will both admire the funeral games of the fifth book of the Æneid: but whenever you desire to excite in them a strong emotion, you must present to them images analogous to their very different natures. How will you bring a poor Prussian student of Königsberg, who is shivering with cold for eleven months of the year, to relish the eclogues of Virgil, and to feel the pleasure of being in the shade of a cool grotto by the side of a bubbling spring?

Viridi projectus in antro.

A comfortable room, well heated by a

good stove, would afford him a much more agreeable image.

We may apply this illustration to all the fine arts. To an honest Fleming, who has never studied design, the forms of Ruben's women are the most beautiful in the world. Let not us, who admire slenderness of form above every thing else, and to whom the figures even of Raphael's women appear rather massive, be too ready to laugh at him. If we were to consider the matter closely, it would appear that each individual, and, consequently, each nation, has a separate idea of beauty, which is a combination of every thing that pleases him most in things of the same nature.

The ideal beauty of Paris, is that which most gratifies the majority of the Parisians. In music, for instance, M. Garat pleases them a hundred times more than Madame Catalani, though all, I know not why, would not allow that they were of this opinion. In a matter so indifferent to the welfare of the state as the fine arts, what mischief could this harmless liberty occasion? A

We need only open our eyes to perceive, twenty times in a day, that the French nation has changed its habits within the last thirty years. Nothing less resembles what we were in 1780, than a young Frenchiman of 1814. We were lively and restless ;-these gentlemen are almost English. There is more gravity; more of what is rational, and less of what is agreeable. Our youth, who will be the whole nation twenty years hence, having changed, our poor rhetoricians must reason more beside the mark than usual, if they will have the fine arts to remain the same.

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"For my own part, I must confess," said a young colonel to me, that, since the campaign of Moscow, I do not think Iphigenia in Aulis so fine a tragedy. Achilles appears to me rather too much of a dupe, and I begin to prefer Shakespeare's Macbeth."

But I am rather wandering: it is evident, that I am not a young Frenchman of 1814. Let us return to our point, which is, to ascertain whether, in music, the ideal beauty of a Dane can be the same with that of a Neapolitan.

The nightingale is a favourite in every