The horn, eighty years ago, was not a very important instrument in Italian orchestration. But such as it was the elder Rossini played it in more than one operatic band; and in due time, and to all appearances as soon as it was physically possible to do so, the father taught the art of playing the horn to his precocious son. Rossini was still very young when he accompanied his parents on musical excursions, or "tours" as they would now be called; and on these occasions, when the father took the part of first horn in some local orchestra--which was sometimes nothing more than the band of a travelling show--the part of second horn was assigned to the son. The mother at the same time sang on the stage. Rossini, then, at once vocalist and instrumentalist, began his career in both characters at a very early age. It has been seen that at seven he appeared on the stage as an operatic singer. Between the ages of seven and twelve he was much occupied in horn playing; and his performances in company with his father had probably some effect in developing that taste for wind instruments and especially for horns, for which his orchestration was one day to be remarkable. In his thirteenth year Rossini was taken to Bologna and presented to Professor Tesci of that city. The professor heard the little boy sing and play, and was so pleased with his performances that he procured him an engagement as chorister in one of the local churches. It was of this period in Rossini's life that Heine was thinking when, in his well-known article on Rossini's _Stabat Mater_, he wrote: "The true character of Christian art does not reside in thinness and plainness of the body, but in a certain effervescence of the soul which neither the musician nor the painter can appropriate to himself either by baptism or by study; and in this respect I find in the _Stabat_ of Rossini a more truly Christian character than in the _Paulus_ of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy; an oratorio which the adversaries of Rossini point to as a model of the Christian style. Heaven preserve me from wishing to express by that the least blame against a master so full of merits as the composer of _Paulus_; and the author of these letters is less likely than any one to wish to criticise the Christian character of the oratorio in question from clerical, or, so to say, pharisaical reasons. I cannot, however, avoid pointing out that at the age when Mendelssohn commenced Christianity at Berlin (he was only baptized in his thirteenth year), Rossini had already deserted it a little, and had lost himself entirely in the mundane music of operas. Now he has again abandoned the latter to carry himself back in dreams to the Catholic recollections of his first youth--to the days when he sang as a child in the choir of the Pesaro [for which read Bologna] cathedral, and took part as an acolyte in the service of the holy mass."