too, he resigned, and went away with the design of making a musical tour through France, Germany, and Italy.  Nourrit, who was subject to alternate fits of excitement and depression, was maddened to such a degree by a series of articles praising Duprez at his expense, that his friends feared for his sanity, a dread which was ominously realized in Italy two years afterward, where Nourrit was then singing.  Though he was very warmly welcomed by the Italians, his morbid sensibility took offense at Naples at what he fancied was an unfavorable opinion of his Pollio in “Norma.”  His excitement resulted in delirium, and he threw himself from his bedroom window on the paved court-yard below, which resulted in instant death.  Nourrit was the intimate friend of many of the most distinguished men of the age in music, literature, and art, and his sad death caused sincere national grief.

As a singer and actor, Nourrit had one of the most creative and originating minds of his age.  He himself never visited the United States, but his younger brother, Auguste, was a favorite tenor in New York thirty years ago.

The part of John of Leyden in “Le Prophete,” whose gestation covered many years of growth and change, was originally written for and in consultation with Nourrit, just as that of Fides in the same opera was remolded for and by suggestion of Pauline Viardot.  Yet the opera did not see the light until Nourrit’s successor, Duprez, had vanished from the stage, and his successor again, Roger, who, though a brilliant singer, was far inferior to the other two in creative intellectuality, appeared on the scene.  Chorley asserts that Du-prez was the only artist he had ever seen and heard whose peculiar qualities and excellences would have enabled him to do entire musical and dramatic justice to the arduous part of John of Leyden....  “I have never seen anything like a complete conception of the character, so wide in its range of emotions; and might have doubted its possibility, had I not remembered the admirable, subtile, and riveting dramatic treatment of Eleazar in ’La Juive’ (the Shyloch of opera) by M. Duprez.”

This artist may be also included as belonging largely to the sphere of Pauline Viardot’s art-life.  Albert Duprez, the son of a French performer, was born in 1806, and, like his predecessor Nourrit, was a student at the Conservatoire.  At first he did not succeed in operatic singing, but, recognizing his own faults and studying the great models of the day, among them Nourrit, whom he was destined to supplant, he finally impressed himself on the public as the leading dramatic singer of France.  According to Fetis and Castil-Blaze, he never had a superior in stage declamation, and the finest actors of the Comedie Francaise might well have taken a lesson from him.  His first great success, which caused his engagement in grand opera, was the creation of Edgardo in “Lucia di Lammermoor” at Naples in 1835.