I tried to explain to Sir Michael that the gentleman against whom he seemed to nourish some feeling of animosity could not be in any way his foe. But the great conductor would not see this. The father, he said, had shown himself his enemy, and he was himself the enemy of the son. The hatred sometimes conceived by one singer for another of the same class of voice and playing the same parts, is, if not more reasonable, at least more intelligible. I shall never forget the rage which the tenor Fancelli once displayed on seeing the name of the tenor Campanini inscribed on a large box at a railway station with these proud words appended to it: "Primo Tenore Assoluto, Her Majesty's Opera Company." It was the epithet "assoluto" which, above all, raised Fancelli's ire. He rushed at the box, attacked the offending words with his walking-stick, and with the end of it tried to rub off the white letters composing the too ambitious adjective, "assoluto." "Assoluto" was an epithet which Fancelli reserved for his own private use, and to which he alone among tenors considered himself justly entitled. Unfortunately, he could not write the word, reading and writing being accomplishments which had been denied to him from his youth upwards. He could just manage to scribble his own name in large schoolboy characters. But his letter-writing and his "autographs" for admiring ladies were done for him by a chorister, who was remunerated for his secretarial work at the rate of something like a penny Pickwick per month. The chorister, however, in agreeing to work on these moderate terms, knew that he had the illustrious tenor in his hands; and in moments of difficulty he would exact his own price and, refusing cheap cigars, accept nothing less than ready money. Occasionally when the chorister was not at hand, or when he was called upon, to give his autograph in presence of other persons, Fancelli found himself in a sad plight; and I have a painful recollection of his efforts to sign his name in the album of the Liverpool Philharmonic Society, which contains the signatures of a large number of celebrated singers and musicians. In this musical Book of Gold Fancelli made an earnest endeavour to inscribe his name, which with the exception only of the "c" and one of the "l's" he succeeded in writing without the omission of any of the necessary letters. He had learned, moreover, to write the glorious words "Primo tenore," and in a moment of aspiration tried to add to them his favourite epithet of "assoluto." He had written a capital "A," followed by three "s's," when either from awkwardness or in order to get himself out of the scrape in which he already felt himself lost, he upset the inkstand over the page. Then he took up the spilt ink on his forefinger and transferred it to his hair; until at last, when he had obliterated the third "s," his signature stood in the book and stands now-- "FANELI PRIMO TENORE ASS--"