Donizetti's last opera was _Catarina Cornaro_, brought out at Naples in 1844. This was his sixty-third dramatic work, without counting a certain number--variously estimated, but not likely to be great--which have not been represented. At least two-thirds of Donizetti's operas have never been heard in England. Soon after the production of _Catarina Cornaro_ Donizetti fell into a melancholy condition. Symptoms of dementia manifested themselves while he was on a visit to Paris. The doctors thought the air of his native town might have some salutary effect, and the patient was accordingly ordered to Bergamo; but the case was already a hopeless one. He was taken to Bergamo, but was attacked with paralysis on the journey; and soon after his arrival, having experienced a second attack, he succumbed. Donizetti, as has already been said, worked for some time before and for many years after Bellini, whom he preceded and survived. Bellini was born in 1806, nine years after Donizetti, and died in 1837, thirteen years before him. He was a native of Sicily, and his father, with whom he took his first lessons in music, was an organist at Catania. The organist was persuaded to send his son to Naples by a Sicilian nobleman, who promised to pay his expenses as a student at the famous Conservatorio, which he in due time entered, and where he had for fellow-pupil Mercadante--more or less known whereever Italian opera has been cultivated by his _Giuramento_, the only one of his numerous works which ever met with anything like an enduring success. Mercadante was a better musician than Bellini. But he possessed far less creative power; and his creations or inspirations in the shape of melodies are seldom comparable in beauty to those of which the scores of _La Sonnambula_, _Norma_, and _I Puritani_ are so full. The tenor's love-song in _Il Giuramento_, and the highly dramatic duet which brings that opera to a conclusion, will be remembered by all who have once heard this masterpiece of a composer who did not produce masterpieces. Opera-goers of the last thirty years cannot altogether forget him; and it may in particular be observed that he made a far more effective use of the orchestra than his more divinely endowed fellow-student, who thought and felt in melody as Ovid, and afterwards Pope, "lisped in numbers:" every sequence of notes that occurred to him being melodious.