Now, how do you like Glasgow? Are you satisfied that chez nous more than one sense is in more than one way assailed? Shall I warn you from the fleshers, all blood and brains, like the cave of Polyphemus? from the poulterers, where, while you are negociating for your solitary partridge, you may be surprised at the cry

Of some strong turkey in its agony *? from the confectioners, under the special patronage of Libitina, as I conjecture from the popular affiche in all of them, of funeral biscuits? from the unscavengered street-crossings, which even voluntary alms would indemnify for cleansing? from contact, if you can help it, with the descendants. of the old Numidian family of Tucfarinas+ (the bakers), who walk arm in arm, and contest the wall with you passim, but chiefly at the cross.

It is hard to quit an inexhaustible subject, but I must conclude; and may, or may not, in my next, slightly perstringe the manners and anticheerful peculiarities of Glasgow. In a capacity for conversation, in acquaintance with its gentle laws, in indulgence for its latitudes, the people of this part of Scotland have made very inconsiderable progress; the playfulness of the social hour you had better not expect, and far better not undertake to promote: the matter-of-factists will put down as your sober opinion, and the guide of your conduct, the inspired by the festivity of the hour, the Lafitte before you, or the lady by your side.

The Sunday here is most sabbatically kept. They shut up the only promenade which in the opening spring possesses the least amenity, the Botanic Gardens, and prevent some scores of people from rejoicing among the most beautiful and consoling of the works of God, in order that the one or two attendants may go to church, that is, listen to-mais que voulez-vous? I dare say some of the ultras would prevent the seed from germinating, or the herb from bursting its vegetable bonds on Sunday, if it depended upon them. I once knew an old woman who shut up her cock together with his concubines-(she should first have separated them)— every Sunday in a dark cellar, to perform penance, before she went to church. In this horrid place, every Sabbath brings a suspension of all that makes other dull places tolerable. Few walk; none venture to mount a horse; the steam-vessel lies like a sleeping water-fowl on the beautiful Clyde, the poor mechanic cannot, if he would, ventilate his lungs, or refresh his wife and children on its pure waters; pent up in his close or vennal, amidst the fomites of fever and dysentery, he must make the best of it. O the horrors of a Scottish Sabbath in its cities! What penances will not men impose on their own consciences !-and the results ? Je n'en sais rien. But I know that the Christian exercise of voice commonly called scandal is not less practised here than elsewhere, and observe that the citizen of the Clyde pursues his diurnal interests with certainly not less intensity of purpose than other people. The same average quantity of solid virtue and social worth may, must exist here, as in other places, but I will say that the virtue is somewhat less seductive, and the social disposition, perhaps in the situation of the kernel of a very hard nut, which must first be broken, and which all will not take the trouble to break.

On the whole, I own that I should not quite like to leave my bones under one of the huge cast-iron SAFES which you see placed over the tombs. These safes are grilles of great solidity and large dimensions, which, on the first inspection, suggest a suitable accommodation for an extensive menagerie; you seem to have a right to expect the muzzle of a lion or the formidable claw of a tiger to protrude from beneath. Adieu, then, till we meet in spring to enjoy our pleasant walk along the Boulevards.

I remain, dear Vernon, yours affectionately,

the bubbling cry

HENRY D'ARCY.

Of some strong swimmer in his agony.-Don Juan.
+ Tacfarinas.-Tacit. Annal.

PAGANINI'S Fiddle.

"Il cantar, che nell ANIMA, si sente."-PETRARCH.

"This must be spirit music, good my Lord!"-TEMPEST.

WHAT traveller who has ever visited" Genoa la Superba" can forget the Strada Balbi, with its marble palaces, its bright frescos, and hanging orange groves? Who can forget that clear blue sky, whose tints are reflected in the Mediterranean, and whose heat is tempered by the "aria marina" which there so gratefully refreshes the southern atmosphere? Bright and sunny as the picture is, still, like all others, it has its reverse; and some of the narrow lanes, which lie in the vicinity of this magnificent street, present, as if by way of contrast, scenes of dirt, desolation, and wretchedness, unequalled in any even of the Italian cities.

In one of these miserable byways, in 1810, the period at which our story commences, Nicolo Paganini, the violinist" par excellence," whose name has since been borne upon the wings of Fame throughout all Europe, and who has been deemed, in the judgment of the musical world, unrivalled and supreme in the arcana of his art, dwelt in poverty, unnoticed and unknown. He was the inhabitant of one of the poorest shops in the "vicolo," or narrow lane, and barely obtained enough by working as a musical instrument-maker to support himself and his aged mother, who for many years had been his sole companion. For some time past their circumstances had been gradually declining, and the little patrimony bequeathed to Paganini by his father had been dissipated and exhausted, so that the poor Genoese had been reduced from comparative independence to obtain his daily bread by his daily labour. This had not always been the case. The little shop of Paganini had at one time exhibited an appearance of comfort, and even wealth; he and his mother Brigitta had been decently clad; and as there were not many tradesmen in Genoa who followed the same occupation, he had obtained a tolerable livelihood. At that period he might regularly have been seen working cheerfully at the door of his little habitation, gaily humming some of the favourite airs of his native city, and repaying with interest the good-humoured jokes of the Genoese damsels, who often raised their veils in passing to gaze upon his thin, ungainly figure, and wild, spirit-like face. But all his bright prospects of independence had been clouded; and one unfortunate calamity seemed to doom him to continued melancholy and to hopeless poverty-he had become the victim of monomania; a devoted prey to one unchangeable idea, which haunted him night and day, and whose impulses he blindly followed, regardless of the privations he might suffer or give rise to. His poor mother, deeply afflicted at seeing him thus dissipate his substance, in vain entreated him not to reduce her to misery. Her supplications were disregarded, sometimes unheard, and her son continued to neglect his ordinary occupation; so that by degrees all his savings, his stock in trade, his furniture, and even his very clothes, were swallowed up in the expenses incurred by the futile experiments which his monomania induced him to make. It must, however, be confessed, that if there had been any chance of his attaining his object, Paganini had hit upon an excellent speculation. Having in his possession a violin of the celebrated

Mantuan maker, Tartini, for which several amateurs had offered him extravagant prices, the idea of imitating the excellencies of that maker suddenly flashed across his mind. He calculated, fairly enough, that if he could produce a violin, copied from his model with mathematical exactness, formed of a similar description of wood, and coloured and varnished in a similar manner, his instrument would fully equal the original in tone and value. In spite, however, of all his endeavours, he always discovered some trifling differences between the copy and the model-some indefinitely slight distinctions which rendered it necessary to commence the work over again. Thus the poor instrument-maker seemed destined to the endless task of constructing new violins, and of making infinitely close approximations to, without ever reaching, the perfection which he aimed at. At last, after many experiments, Paganini's original idea became somewhat modified; he had completed a violin which, to all appearance, was a perfect copy of the Tartini, and which, nevertheless, was so wholly inferior to it, that Paganini began to suspect that some element of a superior nature, some intellectual essence above his reach, existed in the composition of that chef-d'œuvre of violins. "Who knows," said he, raising his tall, thin figure, and fixing his dark, unearthly eyes upon a Genoese professor, who endeavoured to solve his problem by some new application of the theory of sound,— "Who knows whether I should not seek, out of the pale of this gross material world, the solution of my doubts? Words are the representatives of ideas, are they not? Well then, when I speak of the soul of music which dwells within my violin, perhaps I may have unwittingly mentioned the obstacle which retards me; perhaps there may be a soul of music! What think you, Signor ?" The Professor, with an inward conviction of the madness of poor Paganini, only answered by shaking his head in that oracular, Lord Burleigh style which means everything or nothing, and left the shop, while Paganini continued soliloquising. 66 Aye, the soul of music! but how is that spirit to be invoked, and to what incantations will it prove submissive? I have heard of one Mozart, a German, who has effected wondrous music with a zauberflöte, (a magic flute,) why should there not be also a magic violin? Let me consider now. His head sunk on his breast, and he only became the more deeply buried in his speculations.

One day a customer, who brought him a fiddle-bow to have it repaired, forgot in his shop a book, which remained there unreclaimed for some time. Paganini, in his hours of leisure, which were rare, (for when his hands were not engaged in manual labour his poor visionary brains were at work,) turned over the leaves. It was one of those respectable monuments of Florentine patience which the press of Messer Giulio Aliberti produced in the seventeenth century-the prototype of the modern Encyclopædias and Societies for the Diffusion of Knowledge. The author of the work, which thus fell into Paganini's hands, modestly professed his intention to treat "de omnibus rebus, and also of many other things," and certainly did his best to fulfil his profession by making his book, like Lord Brougham's head, a universal repertorium! There a chapter upon the best form of government was to be found beside one upon the Eleven Thousand Virgins of Cologne; and a receipt for making Cyprus wine was followed by a dissertation on the Council of Trent. As Paganini indolently, turned over its leaves, the words "Transmigration of Souls" suddenly met his eye. He started up in extasy, feeling that his

hour was come, and that the great secret which he had so long sought, and sought for in vain, was on the point of being revealed to him. He devoured the chapter, which contained merely an account of the Indian doctrine of the Metempsychosis; and conceiving that a new light had burst in upon him, occupied himself in making preparations for the great physiological experiment, which he hoped would soon crown his efforts.

Three months after Paganini had perused the volume which had so deeply attracted his attention, and had become imbued with the idea of the eternal transmigration of souls, through animate and inanimate bodies, thus convincing himself of the possibility of animating an inanimate violin, the interior of the little shop which he inhabited presented a strange and unusual scene. It was one o'clock in the morning; not a sound was to be heard in the devoted streets of Genoa; and then, in a small apartment behind his shop, whose darkness was only rendered visible by one small lamp, lay Brigitta Paganini, the mother of our artist, in the pangs of her last hour, upon the very same black leather bed on which, thirty years before, her son Nicolo had been brought into the world. We would not, however, insinuate for a moment, that Paganini had murdered his mother for the sake of establishing his theory. No; he had not as yet reached so high a degree of apathetic philosophy. The respectable old lady was only dying of a cancer, which she had rendered inveterate by copious doses of rosolia. There she lay, a prey to all the agonies which that torturing disease inflicts upon its victims, speechless, and only giving evidence of her existence by deep and painful groans; and beside the bed stood her son Nicolo, pale but determined, unnerved by the pangs of which he was witness, not one tear glistening in his eyes,-not one muscle of his face exhibiting an expression of sympathy. No: all his faculties were absorbed in watching the expiring woman, while he applied to her dying lips a long leathern tube connected with the violin lying upon the table. At fifty-two minutes and some seconds past one the respiration of poor Brigitta suddenly ceased; her pulse stopped, her eye became fixed; and her son, almost shouting for joy, having received her last breath in the tube, hermetically stopped the entrance, and forced the dying sigh down the leathern passage into the body of the violin. This, it is hardly necessary to inform our readers, was the experiment over which Paganini had so long pondered. This was the impious attempt which, with the heartlessness of ambition, he made to imprison the soul of his respectable mother in the bowels of a violin. Happily, however, the superhuman experiment was frustrated. The Indian philosophers, who fancied the last sigh, the anima ultima, to be synonimous with the soul, had misled him through their false system of metaphysics. The human soul has other modes of reaching the regions of eternal misery or bliss than through the medium of human respiration; and the result of the experiment was to imprison, not the soul, but the ghost, the surviving human breath of the estimable Brigitta, in the fiddle of her son. It must not, however, be imagined that such audacious tampering with the things of the invisible world were unattended with evil to the bold experimenter. At the moment when the great effort was accomplished, and the ghost was heard fluttering for freedom against the sides of the violin, Paganini, exhausted by the efforts which he had made, and the emotions which he had experienced, sunk lifeless upon the floor, and remained there until the sun was already high in the heavens.

When he recovered, it was only by slow degrees that the transactions of the night were presented to his mind. With a slow and trembling step he approached the bed upon which his mother lay. He closed her eyes, which seemed to regard him with a melancholy and reproachful glance; and then, throwing aside all thoughts of repentance, rushed in ecstacy to the table on which the violin lay, and, gently touching the strings, ascertained, from the soothing spiritual sounds which issued from it, that his experiment had not been without effect. His violin had at length become a something more than human!

Gradually, and by awful degrees, did Paganini venture to make use of the magic power which he had thus acquired. The place in which the incantation had been performed grew hateful to him: he quitted Genoa, where he had become an object of suspicion and envy, and went to exhibit his magic violin upon the more extensive theatres of Rome and Naples. Everywhere his music produced the most astonishing effects; everywhere he was heard with the deepest rapture, his performance striking even the most jealous of his rivals dumb with admiration. At Rome he had the honour of a private audience with the Pope at the Quirinal Palace, and had the incredibly religious audacity to perform upon the spirit of his mother for the entertainment of Pius VII. and a select conclave of Cardinals. The Pontiff, after consulting Cardinal Gonsalvi, pronounced the music to be heavenly!-a judgment which the reader must needs regard as a striking proof of Papal fallibility, as the spirit of Brigitta was not in heaven, and, at best, was subject to all the tortures of a musical purgatory,-now groaning in the de profundis of a bass, and now hurried aloft into the aërial wailings of e in altissimo. Her voice is particularly observable in his E flats. However Paganini departed from Rome covered with honours; and at Naples his success was still more remarkable. The King assigned a suite of apartments in the Caserta Palace for his use. The Lazzaroni, awakened from their usual "dolce far niente," pointed him out to each other in the streets, "Ecco il gran sonatore;" and, better than all, the Operahouse was crowded to suffocation every night of his performance, and crowns and sonnets were showered upon his head. Little did the Roman Pontiff, or the amateurs of the San Carlo, think, while they listened to 'the unearthly tones of the enchanted instrument, that it was spirit music sounded in their ears,—that it was the injured spirit of the imprisoned Brigitta pleading in plaintive tones for her release.

At length, thanks to the newspapers and M. Laporte, the fame of Paganini reached the good city of London, where higher rewards than even those in the Arabian tale await the inventor of a new pleasure, and where novelty calls down a golden shower more surely than the conductor attracts the electric fluid. Money was all-powerful in the soul of the Italian, and to London he went; passing, however, through Paris, where he had the good fortune of "assisting" at a grand review of the National Guard by Louis Philippe, one or two émeutes," and about a dozen concerts. At London Paganini at last arrived; and there his unhallowed thirst for fame and gold was doomed to experience some foretaste of its punishment. It is true that his concerts were well attended; his name was the topic of every tongue; enterprising booksellers puffed his pseudo-biographies; grave physiologists wrote essays upon his physical organization; his face and figure disfigured every printshop; and sentimental young ladies (there is no nation more