exclamation, “That woman’s an inspired idiot!” while Weber limped up and down the room silently wringing his hands, and Sir George Smart went off into ecstatic reminiscences of a certain performance of my mother’s, when—­in some musical arrangement of “Blue Beard” (by Kelly or Storace, I think), in the part of Sister Anne—­she waved and signaled and sang from the castle wall, “I see them galloping!  I see them galloping!” after a very different fashion, that drew shouts of sympathetic applause from her hearers.

Miss Paton married Lord William Lennox, was divorced from her husband and married Mr. Wood, and pursued her career as a public singer for many years successfully after this event; nor was her name in any way again made a subject of public animadversion, though she separated herself from Mr. Wood, and at one time was said to have entertained thoughts of going into a Roman Catholic nunnery.  Her singing was very admirable, and her voice one of the finest in quality and compass that I ever heard.  The effects she produced on the stage were very remarkable, considering the little intellectual power or cultivation she appeared to possess.  My father’s expression of “an inspired idiot,” though wrung from him by the irritation of momentary annoyance, was really not inapplicable to her.  She sang with wonderful power and pathos her native Scotch ballads, she delivered with great purity and grandeur the finest soprano music of Handel, and though she very nearly drove poor Weber mad with her apparent want of intelligence during the rehearsals of his great opera, I have seldom heard any thing finer than her rendering of the difficult music of the part of Reiza, from beginning to end, and especially the scene of the shipwreck, with its magnificent opening recitative, “Ocean, thou mighty monster!”

“Oberon” was brought out and succeeded; but in a degree so far below the sanguine expectations of all concerned, that failure itself, though more surprising, would hardly have been a greater disappointment than the result achieved at such a vast expenditure of money, time, and labor.  The expectations of the public could not have been realized by any work which was to be judged by comparison with their already permanent favorite, “Der Freyschuetz.”  No second effort could have seemed any thing but second-best, tried by the standard of that popular production; and whatever judgment musicians and connoisseurs might pronounce as to the respective merits of the two operas, the homely test of the “proof of the pudding” being “in the eating” was decidedly favorable to the master’s earlier work; and my own opinion is, that either his “Euryanthe” or his “Preciosa” would have been more popular with the general English public than the finer and more carefully elaborated music of “Oberon.”  The story of the piece (always a main consideration in matters of art, with average English men and women) wanted interest, certainly, as compared with that of its predecessor; the chivalric loves and adventures