Alfieri, like Luther and Milton, found the greatest solace and inspiration in music. "Nothing," said he, "so moves my heart, and soul and intellect, and rouses my very faculties, like music--and especially the music of woman's voice. Almost all my tragedies have been conceived under the immediate emotion caused by music." Voltaire took pleasure in the Opera, (not so Thomas Carlyle, as you may have seen), and there dictated some of his most brilliant letters. But the foibles of men of genius are endless; and would be a curious subject for some Disraeli, in a future volume of the Curiosities of Literature, to depict at length, if the subject be indeed worth the required amount of pains and labor. MY NOVEL; OR, VARIETIES IN ENGLISH LIFE.[5] BOOK XII.--INITIAL CHAPTER. "Again," quoth my father--"Again behold us! We who greeted the commencement of your narrative, who absented ourselves in the mid course, when we could but obstruct the current of events, and jostle personages more important--we now gather round the close. Still, as the chorus to the drama, we circle round the altar with the solemn but dubious chant which prepares the audience for the completion of the appointed destinies; though still, ourselves, unaware how the skein is to be unraveled, and where the shears are to descend." [5] Continued from the September Number. So there they stood, the Family of Caxton--all grouping round me--all eager officiously to question--some over-anxious prematurely to criticise. "Violante can't have voluntarily gone off with that horrid Count," said my mother; "but perhaps she was deceived, like Eugenia by Mr. Bellamy, in the novel of 'CAMILLA.'" "Ha!" said my father, "and in that case it is time yet to steal a hint from Clarissa Harlowe, and make Violante die less of a broken heart than a sullied honor. She is one of those girls who ought to be killed! _Ostendent omnia letum_--all things about her forebode an early tomb!" "Dear, dear!" cried Mrs. Caxton, "I hope not--poor thing!" "Pooh, brother," said the Captain, "we have had enough of the tomb in the history of poor Nora. The whole story grows out of a grave, and to a grave it must return:--if, Pisistratus, you must kill somebody, kill Levy." "Or the Count," said my mother, with unusual truculence. "Or Randal Leslie," said Squills. "I should like to have a _post-mortem_ cast of his head--it would be an instructive study." Here there was a general confusion of tongues, all present conspiring to bewilder the unfortunate author with their various and discordant counsels how to wind up his story and dispose of his characters.