the music of the Figaro in Mozart’s “Nozze” admirably.  He had a good deal of his sister’s winning charm of manner, and was (but not, I think, of malice prepense) that pleasantly pernicious creature, a male flirt.  It was quite out of his power to address any woman (sister or niece or cookmaid) without an air and expression of sentimental courtesy and tender chivalrous devotion, that must have been puzzling and perplexing in the extreme to the uninitiated; and I am persuaded that until some familiarity bred—­if not contempt, at least comprehension—­every woman of his acquaintance (his cook included) must have felt convinced that he was struggling against a respectful and hopeless passion for her.

Of another acquaintance of ours in Edinburgh, a Mrs. A——­, I wish to say a word.  She was a very singular woman; not perhaps in being tolerably ignorant and silly, with an unmeaning face and a foolish, commonplace manner, an average specimen of vacuity of mind and vapidity of conversation, but undoubtedly singular in that she combined with these not un-frequent human conditions a most rare gift of musical and poetical interpretation—­a gift so peculiar that when she sang she literally seemed inspired, taken possession of, by some other soul, that entered into her as she opened her mouth and departed from her as she shut it.  She had a dull, brick-colored, long, thin face, and dull, pale-green eyes, like boiled gooseberries; but when in a clear, high, sweet, passionless soprano, like the voice of a spirit, and without any accompaniment, she sang the old Scotch ballads which she had learned in early girlhood from her nurse, she produced one of the most powerful impressions that music and poetry combined can produce.  From her I heard and learned by ear “The Douglas Tragedy,” “Fine Flowers in the Valley,” “Edinbro’,” and many others, and became completely enamored of the wild beauty of the Scotch ballads, the terror and pity of their stories, and the strange, sweet, mournful music to which they were told.  I knew every collection of them, that I could get hold of, by heart, from Scott’s “Border Minstrelsy” to Smith’s six volumes of “National Scottish Songs with their Musical Settings,” and I said and sang them over in my lonely walks perpetually; and they still are to me among the deepest and freshest sources of poetical thought and feeling that I know.  It is impossible, I think, to find a truer expression of passion, anguish, tenderness, and supernatural terror, than those poems contain.  The dew of heaven on the mountain fern is not more limpid than the simplicity of their diction, nor the heart’s blood of a lover more fervid than the throbbing intensity of their passion.  Misery, love, longing, and despair have found no finer poetical utterance out of Shakespeare; and the deepest chords of woe and tenderness have been touched by these often unknown archaic song-writers, with a power and a pathos inferior only to his.  The older ballads, with the exquisite monotony of their