only place where "the mighty magic" of his bow could possibly have been
acquired. Then, as to the delinquency which led to his incarceration,
there were various accounts: some imputed it to his having been a
captain of banditti; others, only a carbonaro; some to his having killed
a man in a duel; but the more current and generally received story was,
that he had stabbed or poisoned his wife, or, as some said, his
mistress; although, as fame had ascribed to him no fewer than four
mistresses, it was never very clearly made out which of his seraglio it
was who had fallen the victim of his vengeance. The story not improbably
might have arisen from his having been confounded with a contemporary
violin-player of the name of Duranowski, a Pole, to whom in person he
bore some resemblance, and who, for some offence or other having been
imprisoned at Milan, during the leisure which his captivity afforded,
had contrived greatly to improve himself in his art; and when once
it was embodied into shape, the fiction naturally enough might have
obtained the more credence, from the fact that two of his most
distinguished predecessors, Tartini and Lolly, had attained to the great
mastery which they possessed over their instrument during a period of
solitude--the one within the walls of a cloister, the other in the
privacy and retirement of a remote country village. At all events, the
rumours were universally circulated and believed, and the innocent and
much injured Paganini had for many years unconsciously stood forth in
the eyes of the world as a violator of the laws, and even a convicted
murderer--not improbably, to a certain extent, reaping the golden fruits
of that "bad eminence;" for public performers, as we too often see, who
have once lost their "good name," so far from finding themselves, in the
words of Iago, "poor indeed," generally discover that they have only
become objects of greater interest and attraction. How long he had lived
in the enjoyment of this supposed infamy, and all the benefits accruing
from it, we really cannot pretend to say; but he seems never to have