Donizetti, like so many other composers, was not encouraged by his parents to adopt the career in which he was destined to obtain so much distinction. When, however, his father at last consented to his becoming a professional musician, he is said to have presented him with an ivory scraper, as if to impress upon him the necessity of practising the art of erasing. Probably no composer ever did less in that line than Donizetti; and though he wrote more accurately than many other Italian composers, one is frequently astonished to find in his works melodies of significance and beauty followed at haphazard by the merest trivialities. Donizetti never went to work without the paternal scraper by his side. The fluent composer, however, had no occasion to make use of it for scratching out notes; and it never seems to have occurred to him to strike out feeble passages, not to say entire pieces. What Donizetti's father should have given him was not a scraper but a pair of scissors. Donizetti, born at Bergamo in 1798, was but seventeen years of age when he commenced his studies in his native town under Mayer, who, before the appearance of Rossini, was one of the most popular composers in Italy; and he finished them (so far as studies can ever be finished) at Bologna under Pilotti and Mattei, the latter of whom had some years previously been Rossini's instructor. Finding that Mattei gave him very few lessons at the Bologna Lyceum, where he was professor, the youthful and ingenious Donizetti contrived to obtain supplementary ones by making himself very agreeable to his master and by turning the conversation as often as possible to musical subjects. He even went so far as to play at cards every evening with Mattei's aged mother, a piece of benevolence for which he was rewarded by much instructive talk from the grateful son. While at the Lyceum Donizetti occupied himself not only with music, but also with drawing, architecture, and even poetry; and that he could turn out fair enough verses for musical purposes was shown when, many years afterwards, he wrote--so rapidly that the word "improvised" might here be used--for the benefit of a manager in distress, both words and music of a little one-act opera, called _Il Campanello_, founded on the _Sonnette de Nuit_ of Scribe.