Many circumstances have thus far combined to prevent the forming of a decisive judgment in the public mind as to the position which should be assigned to Cherubini in the musical world. The path which leads to the proper understanding of an artist's personality, through a study of the character of the nation to which he belongs, seems in this instance to be effectually blocked, for in the subject of our essay we behold the phenomenon especially rare among the Italians--an international musician. Though Cherubini was trained in the forms of old Italian church music under the severe and thorough tuition of Sarti, pupil of Padre Martini, the learned Bolognese contrapuntist, and though familiar from childhood with the light and artistic opera-melodies of his fatherland, yet this native of Florence was destined to achieve his life work in a foreign land. Cherubini composed the greater number and most important of his works for the _Conservatoire_ in Paris, the city which became his second home. And, finally, it was through the study of a world-renowned German master, belonging to his own time, that the whole nature of the man was first stirred to its foundation. From all this it follows readily enough that while Cherubini reveals alike to the Italians, the French, and the Germans certain traits which are characteristic of each nationality, he awakens for the most part in one and all a certain feeling of strangeness. The different elements which make up his musical personality are not welded together externally, nor was anything further from the master's thought than to offer something to every nation in a vain struggle to win for himself the applause of the world. Let it rather be regarded as the strongest impulse of his earnest, reflective nature to appropriate for his development everything that could be acquired from the collective artistic culture of the race. These acquisitions he was able to fuse together into a musical language of peculiar significance, incapable of comparison with any other; but in so doing he was obliged to renounce the sort of sympathy which, resting upon a national foundation, draws souls together as by an irresistible force.