time by starlight and sunlight roaming about the country adjacent to the Holy City in search of adventures.  He had soon come to the conclusion that he had not much to learn of Italian music; that he could teach rather than be taught.  He speaks of Roman art with the bitterest scorn, and Wagner himself never made a more savage indictment of Italian music than does Berlioz in his “Memoires.”  At the theatres he found the orchestra, dramatic unity, and common-sense all sacrificed to mere vocal display.  At St. Peter’s and the Sistine Chapel religious earnestness and dignity were frittered away in pretty part-singing, in mere frivolity and meretricious show.  The word “symphony” was not known except to indicate an indescribable noise before the rising of the curtain.  Nobody had heard of Weber and Beethoven, and Mozart, dead more than a score of years, was mentioned by a well-known musical connoisseur as a young man of great promise!  Such surroundings as these were a species of purgatory to Berlioz, against whose bounds he fretted and raged without intermission.  The director’s receptions were signalized by the performance of insipid cavatinas, and from these, as from his companions’ revels in which he would sometimes indulge with the maddest debauchery as if to kill his own thoughts, he would escape to wander in the majestic ruins of the Coliseum and see the magic Italian moonlight shimmer through its broken arches, or stroll on the lonely Campagna till his clothes were drenched with dew.  No fear of the deadly Roman malaria could check his restless excursions, for, like a fiery horse, he was irritated to madness by the inaction of his life.  To him the dolce far niente was a meaningless phrase.  His comrades scoffed at him and called him “Pere la Joie,” in derision of the fierce melancholy which despised them, their pursuits and pleasures.

At the end of the year he was obliged to present, something before the Institute as a mark of his musical advancement, and he sent on a fragment of his “Mass” heard years before at St. Roch, in which the wise judges professed to find the “evidences of material advancement, and the total abandonment of his former reprehensible tendencies.”  One can fancy the scornful laughter of Berlioz at hearing this verdict.  But his Italian life was not altogether purposeless.  He revised his “Symphonie Fantastique,” and wrote its sequel, “Lelio,” a lyrical monologue, in which he aimed to express the memories of his passion for the beautiful Miss Smithson.  These two parts comprised what Berlioz named “An Episode in the Life of an Artist.”  Our composer managed to get the last six months of his Italian exile remitted, and his return to Paris was hastened by one of those furious paroxysms of rage to which such ill-regulated minds are subject.  He had adored Miss Smithson as a celestial divinity, a lovely ideal of art and beauty, but this had not prevented him from basking in the rays of the earthly Venus.  Before leaving Paris he had had an intrigue