“Oh! that is Mr. Nivernois,” said Mrs. Althorpe; “a very odd person, by the by; I intended to have sent for him to sup with us to-night.” After a few moments, the door of the box opened, and Mr. Nivernois came in. There was something very remarkable in his appearance: regular, well-chiselled features, of an Italian cast; pale complexion; large, black, vivid eyes, and long, straight black hair; in his countenance was an aspect of force and fire, keen intellectual action, and the power of deep passion. He was negligently dressed, and was very careless in his manner. “This opera does not seem to be very popular to-night,” said Mrs. Althorpe to him. “And yet it is a fine one.” “Nay,” he replied, “if you were to set Austerlitz or the Angel Gabriel to music, people would still complain.” He turned round to Mr. Hartford, and began to put to him a variety of questions about music, with such rapidity as gave him no time to answer one of them. Hartford was ambitious to display his knowledge, and would have been glad to confound his interrogator by his superior taste. But the answer which he had begun to one question was cut off by another, and before that could be attended to, a third had succeeded. When the string was ended, he was so perplexed as to what he should reply to, and so stunned by the fiery fervor of the questioning, that he remained silent. Nivernois fixed his keen eyes upon him, and waited an instant for the reply, which came not. He then turned aside. “Humph!” said he; “for my part, I know nothing of music; not I. I thought I did, until I played three months every morning with Paganini. I would not give up the struggle sooner. At the end of that time I broke my fiddle, and abandoned fiddling forever. It was necessary to do that, or throttle the old hair-scraper. I should strangle with anguish in my chair, if I knew that there was a man living who could excel me in any thing I undertook. But what can one do? We have but one life to live. We are like felons, fumbling with a bunch of keys at the outer door of the sanctuary of immortality, while the police of death are hurrying after us round the corner; and who knows whether he has got the right key? No lasting fame can be founded on music. No melody is immortal but that of the drum and the cannon. That alone is eternally re-produced. How the Corsican knew to touch that instrument!—the Handel of the iron flute! What brave tunes they played off at Borodino and at Eylau! What a concert was given under the pyramids—the companies in squares, the musicians at the angles, and the shod feet of the Mameluke cavalry marking time upon the crusted sand! For the rest, what composer is there whom you recognise as _great_—whose name rushes on the breathless soul, and echoes through the spirit with a sound like thunder, or the voice of Milton? Fashions vary; tastes change. Who plays Purcell?—who sings Arne? The musician cannot throw himself upon that broad, unchanging