which gave her more delight.  The claims on her purse kept pace with the enormous gains which seemed to increase from year to year.  To her large charities and her extravagant habits of living, her husband added the heavy losses to which his passion for the gaming table led him.  It was said in after years that Mme. Catalani should have been worth not less than half a million sterling, so immense had been her gains.  Mr. Waters, in a pamphlet published in 1807, says that her receipts from all sources for that year had been nearly seventeen thousand pounds.  She frequently was paid two hundred pounds for singing “Rule Britannia,” a song in which she became celebrated; and one thousand pounds was the usual honorarium given for her services at a festival.

Mme. Catalani, in addition to her operatic performances, frequently sang at the Ancient Concerts and in oratorio; but she lacked the devotional pathos and tenderness which had given Mara and Mrs. Billington their power in sacred music.  Yet she possessed strong religious sentiments, and always prayed before entering a theatre.  Her somewhat ostentatious piety provoked the following scandalous anecdote:  She was observed reading a prayer from her missal prior to going before the audience one night, and some one, taking the book from the attendant, found it to be a copy of Metastasio.  This story is probably apocryphal, however, like many of the most amusing incidents related of artists and authors.  Certain it is that Catalani never shone in oratorio, or even in the rendering of dramatic pathos; but in bold and brilliant music the world has probably never seen her peer.  To some the immense volume of her voice was not pleasant.  Queen Charlotte criticised it by wishing for a little cotton to put in her ears.  Some wit, being asked if he would go to York to hear her, replied he could hear better where he was.  “Whenever I hear such an outrageous display of execution,” said Lord Mount Edgcumbe, in his “Musical Reminiscences,” “I never fail to recollect and cordially join in the opinion of a late noble statesman, more famous for his wit than for his love of music, who, hearing a remark on the extreme difficulty of some performance, observed that he wished it was impossible.”  It was this same nobleman, Lord North, who perpetrated the following mot:  Being asked why he did not subscribe to the Ancient Concerts, and reminded that his brother, the Bishop of Winchester, had done so, he said, “Oh, if I was as deaf as the good Bishop, I would subscribe too.”

During the period of her operatic career in England, Catalani illustrated the works of a wide variety of composers, both serious and comic; for her dramatic talents were equal to both, and there was no music which she did not master as if by inspiration, though she was such a bad reader that to learn a part perfectly she was obliged to hear it played on the piano.  It was with great unwillingness that she essayed the