Fair Murderess, and any number of pieces named after tears, anger, caprice, sorrow, revenge and desire. Animals and the gods of Greece and Rome were quoted; flanked by wax candles, with suitors smirking at the side of them, and peering in front of them, fair women played music, played it with genteel gravity or bewitching coquetry; played Scarlatti and Emanuel Bach, and all for the love of art—and perhaps a matrimonial future. Let it be remarked, _en passant_, that the keyboard, vastly modified, developed and improved as it is, is still a favorite weapon of feminine offence. Just here get down your Browning from the shelf and consider A Toccata of Galuppi’s. Of Bach, the giant, we do not read in the diaries, letters, and books of this fashionable epoch. That grim old forge-master of fugues would hardly have appealed to the dreams of fair women, even had they been cognizant of his existence. Handel’s piano music was more to their taste; his suites, classical and solid in character, are full of brightly said things, and lie well for the instrument. Joseph Haydn, owing much to Bach’s son Emanuel, wrote pleasing music, light music, for the piano. His sonatas are not difficult, were not difficult for those ladies who could fluently finger Scarlatti. This Italian, with his witty skippings, rapid hand-crossings, and implacable vivacity, is still rainbow gold for most feminine wrists. Mozart, the sweetly lyric, the mellifluous and ever gay Mozart, made sonatas as gods carve the cosmos. Every form he touched he beautified. The piano sonatas, written for money, written with ease, were also written with both eyes on the fair amateur of the period. She admired Mozart more than Haydn; his music was melodious, his decorative patterns prettier. So Mozart raged in the hearts of the ladies, and slender fingers troubled the chaste outlines of his sonatas. His eighteenth sonata, preceded by a fantasia in the same key—C minor—alone impeded the flight of these butterflies. In it were mutterings of the music that awed and thrilled in Don Giovanni, and it was a precursor of Beethoven and his mighty thunderings. Behold the conqueror approaches, the Bonaparte, the Buonarroti, the Balzac of music—Ludwig van Beethoven. In the track of his growling tempests followed women, nobly nurtured, charming women of fashion, Nanette Streicher, Baroness Ertmann, Julia Guicciardi, Thérèse, Bettina, and many more besides. They played for him, and he, great genius and despiser of idle conventions, stretched his stout short body out upon drawing-room couches.