What the manager, on his side, purchased from Rossini, was the right of representation for two years; after which the work might be played by any one, as it might from the first moment be engraved by any one, without payment of any kind. The manuscript could not naturally find its way into the publisher's hands without the composer's consent. But as a matter of custom composers received nothing from the publishers. In England, curiously enough, operatic composers have hitherto, with scarcely an exception, looked exclusively to the publishers for their profits, and have received nothing from the managers. The representation, according to the English view, serves to advertise the work, and to cause a demand at the music shops for the principal pieces. In Italy the engraved music did not apparently find many purchasers. The public cared above all things to hear the music executed on the stage; and with a view to the gratification of this desire the directors found it necessary to provide them constantly with new works, which they moreover found it necessary to order and to pay for. The manager of the Argentina Theatre had experienced some trouble in procuring a suitable subject for the libretto he wished Rossini to set. The censorship was exercised with great severity, or rather with great scrupulosity, by the so-called Patriarch of Constantinople--_Patriarchus in partibus infidelium_ and if, instead of Beaumarchais' _Barber of Seville_, Cesarini had proposed the same author's _Marriage of Figaro_, it is tolerably certain that the Patriarch would have refused to license so revolutionary a drama. When the politically harmless _Barber of Seville_ was suggested, the censor at once approved. But it was now for Rossini to hesitate. To object, he had by the terms of his agreement no right; since he had undertaken to set any libretto that might be given to him, "new or old." The masters of the eighteenth century accepted readily for their operas themes which had been treated again and again, and even actual libretti to which, several times over, music had been composed. Almost every composer, for instance, had tried his hand on Dido Abandoned, or on the Descent of Orpheus into the Infernal Regions; and we have seen that the story of Dido and the story of Orpheus were both treated by Rossini in his early days. Rossini, however, had now ideas of his own on the subject of musical setting, on the subject of dramatic propriety, and probably also on that of the propriety of taking for his theme one that had already been dealt with very successfully by a composer of high repute. Doubtless, in spite of his agreement, he would have refused altogether to take the _Marriage of Figaro_ as subject of an opera, for we know by his recorded conversations with Ferdinand Hiller, that he regarded Mozart as the greatest of all dramatic composers. He felt, too, some delicacy, perhaps even some diffidence, in adopting the verses on which the illustrious Paisiello