be to know that the King was again reconciled to performing the active duties of his state.  Philip considered that he owed his cure to the powers of Farinelli.  The final result was that the singer separated himself from the world of art for ever, and accepted a salary of fifty thousand francs to sing for the King, as David harped for the mad King Saul.  Farinelli told Dr. Burney that during ten years he sang four songs to the King every night without any change.”  When Ferdinand VI., who was also a victim to his father’s malady, succeeded to the throne, the singer continued to perform his minstrel cure, and acquired such enormous power and influence that all court favor and office depended on his breath.  Though never prime minister, Farinelli’s political advice had such weight with Ferdinand, that generals, secretaries, ambassadors, and other high officials consulted with him, and attended his levee, as being the power behind the throne.  Farinelli acquired great wealth, but no malicious pen has ever ascribed to him any of the corrupt arts by which royal favorites are wont to accumulate the spoils of office.  In his prosperity he never forgot prudence, modesty, and moderation.  Hearing one day an old veteran officer complain that the King ignored his thirty years of service while he enriched “a miserable actor,” Farinelli secured promotion for the grumbler, and, giving the commission to the abashed soldier, mildly taxed him for calling the King ungrateful.  According to another anecdote, he requested an embassy for one of the courtiers.  “Do you not know,” said the King, “that this grandee is your deadly enemy?” “True,” replied Farinelli; “and this is the way I propose to get revenge.”  Dr. Burney also relates the following anecdote:  A tailor, who brought him a splendid court costume, refused any pay but a single song.  After long refusal Farinelli’s good nature yielded, and he sang to the enraptured man of the needle and shears, not one, but several songs.  After concluding he said:  “I, too, am proud, and that is the reason perhaps of my advantage over other singers.  I have yielded to you; it is but just that you should yield to me.”  Thereupon he forced on the tailor more than double the price of the clothes.

Farinelli’s influence as a politician was always cast on the side of national honor and territorial integrity.  When the new King, Charles III., ascended the throne, being even then committed to the Franco-Neapolitan imbroglio, which was such a dark spot in the Spanish history of that time, Farinelli left Spain at the royal suggestion, which amounted to a command.  The remaining twenty years of his life he resided in a splendid palace near Bologna, where he devoted his time and attention to patronage of learning and the arts.  He collected a noble gallery of paintings from the hands of the principal Italian and Spanish masters.  Among them was one representing himself in a group with Metastasio and Faustina Bordoni, for whose greatness as an artist and beauty of character he always expressed the warmest admiration.  Though Farinelli was all his life an idol with the women, his appearance was not prepossessing.  Dibdin, speaking of him at the age of thirty, says he “was tall as a giant and as thin as a shadow; therefore, if he had grace, it could only be of a sort to be envied by a penguin or a spider.”