Donizetti, Rossini's immediate successor but not supplanter, composed from sixty to seventy operas ("_c'est beaucoup" dirait_ Candide) of which to this day three at least ("_c'est beaucoup" dirait_ Martin), are still played regularly every season in London: _Lucia, Lucrezia_, and _La Favorita_. Of his two charming works in the light style--comic operas in which the composer never approaches the farcical, never once ceases to be graceful--neither _L'Elisir_ nor _Don Pasquale_ can be compared to the much more vigorous _Barber_. Nor has Donizetti produced any work so full of melody as _Semiramide_, or so dramatic as _William Tell_. But he rises to unwonted heights in the last act of _La Favorite_; which, composed for the French Académie, became naturalised in due time on the Italian operatic stage under the title of _La Favorita_. Although the career of Donizetti was very much longer than that of Bellini, whom he preceded and whom he survived, he produced in proportion to the number of his works fewer by a great deal which have kept the stage. Donizetti brought out his first opera _Enrico di Borgogna_ at Venice in 1818, when he was twenty years of age, and _Catarina Cornaro_, his sixty-third (not to count two or three that were never produced) at Naples, in 1844, when he was forty-six. Bellini brought out the first of his works performed in public, _Bianca e Fernando_ (he had previously composed a sort of pasticcio for the school theatre of the Naples Conservatorio) at the San Carlo in 1826, when he was twenty-five years of age; and his last, _I Puritani_, at Paris in 1835. He had a career then, of but nine years, during which he composed ten operas, of which five were played with great success, and of which three, _La Sonnambula_, _Norma_, and _I Puritani_, forty-five years after their composer's death, still keep the stage. Stendhal (or perhaps it was Carpani) had foretold that Rossini, the composer of florid music, would be followed by a master whose melodies would be remarkable for extreme simplicity, and this prophecy was fulfilled in the case of Bellini.