Rossini made his appearance in public when he was only seven years of age; doing so not, it need scarcely be said, in the character of a composer, but in that of a singer. It was in Paer's _Camilla_, composed for Vienna and afterwards brought out at Bologna, that Rossini, in the year 1799, took the part of a child. "Nothing," says Madame Giorgi-Righetti, the original Rosina in the _Barber of Seville_,[1] "could be more tender, more touching, than the voice and action of this extraordinary child in the beautiful canon of the third act; _senti si fiero instante_. The Bolognese of that time declared that he would some day be one of the greatest musicians known. I need not say whether the prophecy has been verified." Gioachino Antonio Rossini was born on the 29th February, 1792; and the circumstance of his having come into the world in a leap-year justified him, he used to maintain, in counting his birthday, not annually according to the usual custom, but once every four years. According to this method of computation he had numbered nineteen birthdays when, at the age of seventy-seven, he died. What is better worth remembering is the fact that Rossini was born, as if by way of compensation, the very year in which Mozart died; Mozart who, indebted to the Italians for much of the sweetness and singableness of his lovely melodies, was to give to Italy, through Rossini, new instrumental combinations, new dramatic methods, and new operatic forms. It may have been very desirable to show that Rossini was of distinguished ancestry, and that he had a great-uncle, who, in the middle of the sixteenth century, was governor of Ravenna. But it is more interesting to know that he was of good musical parentage. His father, it is true, was nothing more than town trumpeter at Pesaro; herald and crier, that is to say, to the sound of the trumpet. But his mother was what musicians call "an artist." She possessed a very beautiful voice; and when the town trumpeter fell ill or in some other manner incapacitated himself for supporting the family, she replaced him as bread-winner by taking an engagement as an operatic singer. According to one of Rossini's biographers, Rossini the trumpeter came to grief through his political opinions, which were of a more decided character than any that were ever professed, publicly at least, by his eminent son. When, after the Italian campaign, the French army in 1796 entered Pesaro, the old Rossini so far forgot his official position and the duty he owed to the state, as to proclaim his sympathy and admiration for the Republican troops; on whose retirement he was punished for his want of loyalty, being first deprived of his employment and afterwards cast into prison. The trumpet was not the only instrument cultivated by the elder Rossini. He also played the horn; playing it, not like an ordinary town crier, from whom only a few loud flourishes would be expected by way of preliminary announcement, but in true musicianly style.