Rossini must be allowed to be unequalled in genuine comic opera, and to have attained a distinct greatness in serious opera, to be the most comprehensive, and, at the same time, the most national composer of Italy--to be, in short, the Mozart of his country. After all has been admitted and regretted--that he gave too little attention to musical science; that he often neglected to infuse into his work the depth and passion of which it was easily capable; that he placed too high a value on merely brilliant effects _ad captandum vulgus_--there remains the fact that his operas embody a mass of imperishable music, which will live with the art itself. Musicians of every country now admit his wondrous grace, his fertility and freshness of invention, his matchless treatment of the voice, his effectiveness in arrangement of the orchestra. He can never be made a model, for his genius had too much spontaneity and individuality of colour. But he impressed and modified music hardly less than Gluck, whose tastes and methods were entirely antagonistic to his own. That he should have retired from the exercise of his art while in the full flower of his genius is a perplexing fact. No stranger story is recorded in the annals of art with respect to a genius who filled the world with his glory, and then chose to vanish, "not unseen." On finishing his crowning stroke of genius and skill in "William Tell," he might have said with Shakespeare's enchanter, Prospero-- "... But this magic I here abjure; and when I have required Some heavenly music (which even now I do) To work mine end upon their senses that This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff-- Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And, deeper than did ever plummet sound, I'll drown my book." _DONIZETTI AND BELLINI._ I. A bright English critic, whose style is as charming as his judgments are good, says, in his study of the Donizetti music, "I find myself thinking of his music as I do of Domenichino's pictures of 'St. Agnes' and the 'Rosario' in the Bologna gallery, of the 'Diana' in the Borghese Palace at Rome, as pictures equable and skilful in the treatment of their subjects, neither devoid of beauty of form nor of colour, but which make neither the pulse quiver nor the eye wet; and then such a sweeping judgment is arrested by a work like the 'St. Jerome' in the Vatican, from which a spirit comes forth so strong and so exalted, that the beholder, however trained to examine and compare and collect, finds himself raised above all recollections of manner by the sudden ascent of talent into the higher world of genius. Essentially a second-rate composer,[I] Donizetti struck out some first-rate things in a happy hour, such as the last act of 'La Favorita.'"