scenes, and the music could hardly fail to be disjointed and scrappy.  Meyerbeer had little or no feeling for characterisation, so that the opportunities for really dramatic effect which lay in the character of John of Leyden have been almost entirely neglected.  Once only, in the famous cantique ‘Roi du Ciel,’ did the composer catch an echo of the prophetic rapture which animated the youthful enthusiast.  Meyerbeer’s besetting sin, his constant search for the merely effective, is even more pronounced in ‘Le Prophete’ than in ‘Les Huguenots.’  The coronation scene has nothing of the large simplicity necessary for the proper manipulation of a mass of sound.  The canvas is crowded with insignificant and confusing detail, and the general effect is finicking and invertebrate rather than solid and dignified.

Meyerbeer was constantly at work upon his last opera, ‘L’Africaine,’ from 1838 until 1864, and his death found him still engaged in retouching the score.  It was produced in 1865.  With a musician of Meyerbeer’s known eclecticism, it might be supposed that a work of which the composition extended over so long a period would exhibit the strangest conglomeration of styles and influences.  Curiously enough, ‘L’Africaine’ is the most consistent of Meyerbeer’s works.  This is probably due to the fact that in it the personal element is throughout outweighed by the picturesque, and the exotic fascination of the story goes far to cover its defects.

Vasco da Gama, the famous discoverer, is the betrothed lover of a maiden named Inez, the daughter of Don Diego, a Portuguese grandee.  When the opera opens he is still at sea, and has not been heard of for years.  Don Pedro, the President of the Council, takes advantage of his absence to press his own suit for the hand of Inez, and obtains the King’s sanction to his marriage on the ground that Vasco must have been lost at sea.  At this moment the long-lost hero returns, accompanied by two swarthy slaves, Selika and Nelusko, whom he has brought home from a distant isle in the Indian Ocean.  He recounts the wonders of the place, and entreats the government to send out a pioneer expedition to win an empire across the sea.  His suggestions are rejected, and he himself, through the machinations of Don Pedro, is cast into prison.  There he is tended by Selika, who loves her gentle captor passionately, and has need of all her regal authority—­for in the distant island she was a queen—­to prevent the jealous Nelusko from slaying him in his sleep.  Inez now comes to the prison to announce to Vasco that she has purchased his liberty at the price of giving her hand to Don Pedro.  In the next act, Don Pedro, who has stolen a march on Vasco, is on his way to the African island, taking with him Inez and Selika.  The steering of the vessel is entrusted to Nelusko.  Vasco da Gama, who has fitted out a vessel at his own expense, overtakes Don Pedro in mid-ocean, and generously warns his rival of the treachery of Nelusko, who is steering