There are many people who make very little discrimination between one musician and another,--who discern no great gulf between Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, between Rossini and Romberg, between Spohr and Spontini: not in respect of music, but of character; of character in itself, and not as it may develop itself in chaste or florid, sentimental, gay, devotional or dramatic musical forms. And as yet we have very little help in our efforts to gain insight into the inner nature of our great musical artists. Of Meyerbeer the world knows that he was vain, proud, and fond of money,--but whether he had soul or not we do not know; the profound religiousness of Handel, who spent his best years on second-rate operas, and devoted his declining energies to oratorio, we have to guess at rather than reach by direct disclosure; and till Mr. Thayer shall take away the mantle which yet covers his Beethoven, we shall know but little of the interior nature of that wonderful man. But Mendelssohn now stands before us, disclosed by the most searching of all processes, his own letters to his own friends. And how graceful, how winning, how true, tender, noble is the man! We have not dared to write a notice of these two volumes while we were fresh from their perusal, lest the fascination of that genial, Christian presence should lead us into the same frame which prompted not only the rhapsodies of "Charles Auchester," but the same passionate admiration which all England felt, while Mendelssohn lived, and which Elizabeth Sheppard shared, not led. We lay down these volumes after the third perusal, blessing God for the rich gift of such a life,--a life, sweet, gentle, calm, nowise intense nor passionate, yet swift, stirring, and laborious even to the point of morbidness. A Christian without cant; a friend, not clinging to a few and rejecting the many, nor diffusing his love over the many with no dominating affection for a few near ones, but loving his own with a tenacity almost unparalleled, yet reaching out a free, generous sympathy and kindly devotion even to the hundreds who could give him nothing but their love. It is thought that his grief over his sister Fanny was the occasion of the rupture of a blood-vessel in his head, and that it was the proximate cause of his own death; and yet he who loved with this idolatrous affection gave his hand to many whose names he hardly knew. The reader will not overlook, in the second series of letters, the plea in behalf of an old Swiss guide for remembrance in "Murray," nor that long letter to Mr. Simrock, the music-publisher, enjoining the utmost secrecy, and then urging the claims of a man whom he was most desirous to help.