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We need scarcely tell of the musician’s career in England.  We are already familiar with London fashionable life.  We have had life-histories, three volumes at a time, that have taken us into the very houses, told us of all the domestic quarrels, some already healed, some still pending.  It is easy to imagine of whom the world was composed that crowded the concerts of the celebrated musician.  The Pendennises were there, and the Newcomes, Jane Rochester with her blind husband, a young Lord St. Orville with one of the Great-Grand-Children of the Abbey, Mr. Thornton and Margaret Thornton, a number of semi-attached couples, Lady Lufton and her son, the De Joinvilles visiting the Osbornes, from France, Miss Dudleigh and Sarona, Alton Locke, on a visit home, Signor and Signora Mancini, sad-eyed Rachel Leslie with her young brother, a stately descendant of Sir Charles Grandison, the Royal Family, and all the nobility.  When everybody went,—­every one fortunate enough to get a ticket and a seat in the crowded hall,—­it would be invidious to mention names.  It was the fashion to go; and so everybody went who was in the fashion.  Then of course the unfashionables went, that it might not be supposed they were of that class; and with these, all those who truly loved music were obliged to contend for a place.  Fashion was on the side of music, till it got the audience fairly into the hall and in their seats; and then music had to struggle with fashion.  It had to fix and melt the wandering eyes, to tug at the worldly and the stony heart.  And here it was that Arnold’s music won the victory.  The ravishing bonnet of Madam This or That no longer distracted the attention of its envying admirers, or of its owner; the numerous flirtations that had been thought quite worth the price of the ticket, and of the crushed flounces, died away for a few moments; the dissatisfaction of the many who discovered themselves too late in inconspicuous seats was drowned in the deeper and sadder unrest that the music awakened.  For the music spoke separately to each heart, roused up the secrets hidden there, fanned dying hopes or silent longings.  It made the light-hearted lighter in heart, the light-minded heavy in soul.  Where there was a glimpse of heaven, it opened the heavens wider; where there was already hell, it made the abysses gape deeper.  For those few moments each soul communed with itself, and met with a shuddering there, or an exaltation, as the case might be.

After those few moments, outside life resumed its sway.  Buzzing talk swept out the memory of the music.  One song from an opera brought thought back to its usual level.  Men and women looked at each other through their opera-glasses, and, bringing distant outside life close to them, fancied themselves in near communion with it.  The intimacy of the opera-glass was warm enough to suit them,—­so very near at one moment, comfortably distant at the next.  It was an intimacy that could have no return,