“Why were you not here five minutes sooner? Weber has been playing our French scores by heart to me.” A few hours later in a music shop-- “Whom do you think we had here just now? Why, Weber!” At the Odéon people were saying: “Weber has just gone by. He is up in one of the boxes.” It was maddening--I, alone, never saw him. Unlike Shakespeare’s apparitions, he was visible to all but one. Too obscure to dare to write, without a friend who could introduce me, he passed out of my world. Ah, why do not the thrice-gifted ones of this world know of the passionate love and devotion their works inspire! If they could but divine the suppressed admiration of a few faithful hearts! Would they not gladly gather these chosen disciples about them to become a bulwark against the shafts of envy, hatred, malice, and luke-warm tolerance of which a thoughtless world makes them the target! Weber was justly angry when he found out how Castilblaze--veterinary surgeon of music--had butchered his beautiful work, and he published a complaint before leaving Paris. Castilblaze actually had the audacity to play the injured innocent, and to say that it was entirely owing to his adaptation that _Freyschütz_ had succeeded at all! The wretch!----yet a poor sailor gets fifty lashes for the slightest insubordination. Exactly the same thing had been done a few years earlier with Mozart’s _Magic Flute_. It had been botched into a ghastly _pot-pourri_ by Lachnith--whom I hereby pillory with Castilblaze--and given as the _Mysteries of Isis_. Thus mocked, travestied, deprived of a limb here, an eye there--twisted and maimed--these two men of genius were introduced to the French public. How is it that they put up with these atrocities? Mozart assassinated by Lachnith. Weber by Castilblaze--who did the same for Gluck, Mozart, Rossini, and Beethoven. Beethoven’s symphonies “corrected” by Fétis, by Kreutzer, and by Habeneck (of this I have more to say). Molière and Corneille chopped up by Théâtre Français demons. Shakespeare “arranged” for performance in England by Colley Cibber! The list is endless. No, a thousand times no! No man living has a right to try and destroy the individuality of another, to force him to adopt a style not his own, and to give up his natural point of view. If a man be commonplace, let him remain so; if he be great--a choice spirit set above his fellows--then, in the name of all the gods, bow humbly before him, and let him stand erect and alone in his glory. I know that Garrick improved _Romeo and Juliet_ by putting his exquisite, pathetic ending in the place of Shakespeare’s; but who are the miscreants who doctored _King Lear_, _Hamlet_, _The Tempest_, _Richard the Third_? That all comes from Garrick’s example. Every mean scribbler thinks he can give points to Shakespeare.