with the corresponding one for the first violins, goes very well with Figaro's measuring of the room, the diminutions expressing clearly enough his repeated stretches. It cannot be doubted that the situation has suggested the motif, but whether Mozart intended to express the action of measurement is far less certain, and any idea of tone-painting is out of the question. The subordinate characters of the drunken gardener Antonio and the stuttering judge Don Curzio might under other circumstances have been made into caricatures in the sense of opera buffa, but they appear in situations which have so decided a character of a totally different kind that they could not have departed from it without serious injury to that harmony of the whole which none knew better than Mozart how to preserve. The little cavatina (Act IV., 1) for Barbarina, (Fanchette in Beaumarchais) is very significantly not exactly caricatured, but drawn in stronger colours than is elsewhere the case. This little maid, in her liking for Cherubino, and with an open-hearted candour which makes her a true _enfant terrible_ to the Count, is altogether childish, and not only naïve but unformed. It is, therefore, natural that she should express her grief for the lost pin, and her fear of punishment, like a child; and when we hear her sobbing and crying over it we receive the same ludicrous impression which grown-up people rarely fail to feel at the sight of a child expressing the sorrow of his heart with an energy quite out of proportion to the occasion. The fact that the strong accents which Mozart here multiplies to produce the effect of the disproportion of childish {FIGARO.} (87)