magnificent scene, so original and contained and vigorous, is followed by a cloying duet worthy of a Tchaikowsky opera. The adagio of the B-minor Symphony, lovely as it is, has not quite the solidity and weight of the other movements. The happy, popular and brilliantly original themes and ideas of the first quartet are organized with a distinct unskilfulness, while the artistic value of the second is seriously damaged by the cheapness of its cavatina. His workmanship continually reminds one that Borodin was unable to devote himself entirely to composition; that he could come to his writing table only at intervals, only in hours of recreation; and that the government of the Tsar left him to support himself by instructing in chemistry in the College of Medicine and Surgery in Moscow, and kept him always something of an amateur. Borodin the composer is after all only the composer of a few fragments. But sometimes, amid the ruins of an Eastern city, men find a slab of porphyry or malachite so gorgeously grained, that not many whole and perfect works of art can stand undimmed and undiminished beside it. Such is the music of Borodin. Rimsky-Korsakoff The music of Rimsky-Korsakoff is like one of the books, full of gay pictures, which are given to children. It is perhaps the most brilliant of them all, a picture-book illuminated in crude and joyous colors--bright reds, apple greens, golden oranges and yellows--and executed with genuine verve and fantasy. The Slavonic and Oriental legends and fairy tales are illustrated astonishingly, with a certain humor in the matter-of-fact notation of grotesque and miraculous events. The personages in the pictures are arrayed in bizarre and shimmering costumes, delightfully inaccurate; and if they represent kings and queens, are set in the midst of a fabulous pomp and glitter, and wear crowns incrusted with large and impossible stones. Framing the illustrations are border-fancies of sunflowers and golden cocks and wondrous springtime birds, fashioned boisterously and humorously in the manner of Russian peasant art. Indeed, the book is executed so charmingly that the parents find it as amusing as do the children.