The musical discipline adopted by his father appears to have begun in pretty close sequence to this shock; and the days of hard work for poor little Paganini were made to commence, by a shameful perversion, before he could plainly speak. As soon as he could hold a violin, his father put one into his hands, and made him sit beside him from morning till night, to practise it. The willing enthusiasm of the child, as well as the tenderness of his age, might have disarmed the severity of any ordinary preceptor; but the rigor of a stern father, when sharpened by ambition and avarice, _can_ forget the measure of an infant’s powers. The slightest fault, the most pardonable inadvertence, was harshly visited upon the Liliputian performer; and even the privation of food was sometimes resorted to, as part of the barbarous system to enforce precocity. A lasting influence of baneful kind was thus wrought upon a constitution naturally delicate and sensitive: the sickly child, incapable of attaining a healthful maturity, was merged into the suffering man. His mother, with equal but more tender zeal for the development of the talent of young Paganini, succeeded in inspiring him with no slight portion of her own enthusiasm, by persuading him that an angel had appeared to her in a vision, and had assured her that he should outstrip all competition as a performer on the violin. Whether this vision was the result of a pardonable stratagem, or whether it was really the dream of a southern imagination, it is certain that it had the greatest effect on the mind of the infant artist, whose instinctive and irresistible inclination for the art made him an easy recipient of this maternal tale of encouragement. He began also to relish the domestic plaudits which were occasionally awarded to him for the boldness wherewith he produced new, if not legitimate, effects, indicative of future mastery over the powers of the instrument; for the instinct of his mind towards _the extraordinary_ was, even thus early, a thing clearly discernible. He speedily outstripped his father’s slender reach of musical knowledge, as well as that of a minor violinist named Cervetto, who, for a short time, attempted to teach him. Giacomo Costa, director of the orchestra, and first violin in the principal churches, at Genoa, was next charged with his musical direction, and led him more rapidly onwards. At this period (when he was about eight years old), he was to be seen performing some three times a week in the churches, and at private musical parties, upon a fiddle that looked nearly as large as himself. At this time, too, he composed his first Violin Sonata, which, with others of his early musical pennings, is, unfortunately, not extant. A year later, he made what was considered his public _début_, in the great theatre of Genoa, at the request of the noted singers, Marchesi and Albertinotti, who begged of his father to allow the youthful artist to play for their