From time to time Glinka was incapacitated by an affection of the eyes, and his general health was far from satisfactory. He was possessed of a craving to travel in Spain or Italy, and his father's refusal to let him go abroad "hurt me," he says, "to the point of tears." However, a famous doctor having examined him, reported to his father that the young man had "a whole quadrille of ailments" and ought to be sent to a warm climate for at least three years. Glinka left Russia for Italy in 1830, and remained abroad until the spring of 1834. During his visit to Italy, Glinka wrote regularly and fully to his family, but unfortunately the correspondence was not deemed worthy of preservation, and the letters were destroyed shortly after his return. If we may judge by the communications to his friends sent later in life from Spain, France and Germany, the destruction of these records of his early impressions is a real loss to musical biography. The two chief objects of Glinka's journey abroad were to improve his physical condition and to perfect his musical studies. As regards his health, he was benefited perhaps but not cured. "All his life," says Stassov, "Glinka was a martyr to doctors and remedies," and his autobiography is full of details concerning his fainting fits and nervous depression, and his bodily sufferings in general. He had, however, sufficient physical and moral strength to work at times with immense energy. As regards his musical education, Glinka had now begun to realise that his technical equipment did not keep pace with his creative impulse. He felt the need of that theoretical knowledge which Kirnberg says is to the composer what wings are to a bird. He was by no means so completely ignorant of the theory of his art as many of his critics have insinuated. He had already composed music which was quite on a level with much that was popular in his day, and had won some flattering attentions from musical society in St. Petersburg. We must respect the self-criticism which prompted him to put himself to school again at six-and-twenty. But Italy could not give him that deeper and sounder musical culture of which he was in search. In Milan he began to work under Basili, the Director of the Milan Conservatoire, distinguished for having refused a scholarship to Verdi because he showed no aptitude for music. Basili does not seem to have had _la main heureuse_ with budding genius; Glinka found his methods so dry and pedantic that he soon abandoned his lessons as a waste of time. Nevertheless Italy, then and now the Mecca of all aspiring art students, had much to give to the young Russian. He was deeply impressed by the beauty of his surroundings, but, from the practical side, it was in the art of singing and writing for the voice that Glinka made real progress during his sojourn in the South. He had arrived in Italy in company with Ivanov, who became later on the most famous Russian operatic tenor. Glinka's