of art often repeats itself in this way.  First comes the genius burning with celestial fire.  He sweeps away the time-worn formulas, and founds his new art upon their ruins.  Then follows the crowd of disciples, men of talent and imagination, though without the crowning impulse that moves the world.  They repeat and amplify their leader’s maxims, until the world, which at first had stood aghast at teaching so novel, in time grows accustomed to it, and finally accepts it without question.  Next comes the final stage, when what has been caviare to one generation is become the daily bread of the next.  The innovations of the master, caught up and reproduced by his disciples, in the third generation become the conventional formulas of the art, and the world is ripe once more for a revolution!

Deeply as Gluck’s work affected the history of music, his immediate disciples were few.  Salieri (1750-1825), an Italian by birth, was chiefly associated with the Viennese court, but wrote his best work, ‘Les Danaides,’ for Paris.  He caught the trick of Gluck’s grand style cleverly, but was hardly more than an imitator.  Sacchini (1734-1786) had a more original vein, though he too was essentially a composer of the second class.  He was not actually a pupil of Gluck, though his later works, written for the Paris stage, show the influence of the composer of ‘Alceste’ very strongly.  The greatest of Gluck’s immediate followers—­the greatest, because he imbibed the principles of his master’s art without slavishly reproducing his form—­was Mehul (1763-1817), a composer who is so little known in England that it is difficult to speak of him in terms which shall not sound exaggerated to those who are not familiar with his works.  How highly he is ranked by French critics may be gathered from the fact that when ‘Israel in Egypt’ was performed for the first time in Paris some years ago, M. Julien Tiersot, one of the sanest and most clear-headed of contemporary writers on music, gave it as his opinion that Handel’s work was less conspicuous for the qualities of dignity and sonority than Mehul’s ‘Joseph.’  Englishmen can scarcely be expected to echo this opinion, but as to the intrinsic greatness of Mehul’s work there cannot be any question.  He was far more of a scientific musician than Gluck, and his scores have nothing of his master’s jejuneness.  His melody, too, is dignified and expressive, but he is sensibly inferior to Gluck in what may be called dramatic instinct, and this, coupled with the fact that the libretti of his operas are almost uniformly uninteresting, whereas Gluck’s are drawn from the immortal legends of the past, is perhaps enough to explain why the one has been taken and the other left.  Mehul’s last and greatest work, ‘Joseph,’ is still performed in France and Germany, though our national prejudices forbid the hope that it can ever be heard in this country except in a mutilated concert version.  The opera follows the Biblical story closely, and Mehul has reproduced the large simplicity