impressed by the correctness of this delineation, so far as it goes.

But his style of composition is not, to my mind, capricious. It is the
result of many interesting influences of heredity, culture and
individual temperament and application. When he went to Paris, at
fifteen, he was a pupil of Marmontel in piano and of Savard in theory
and composition; but young as he was, the French school did not
satisfy him. He heard Nicholas Rubinstein play while in Paris, and
became fired with enthusiasm by his style and impressed with the idea
that in Germany he would find his own. His father was of Quaker
extraction and had decided artistic ability, but his pious parents
would not permit him to indulge even the thought of cultivating or
pursuing so trivial a calling. Edward inherited his father's talent,
and while in the French capital, during a period of despondency over
his slow progress with the language, he made a caricature of the
teacher of his French class on a leaf of his exercise book. In some
way it fell under the tutor's eye, and it was of such excellence that
it aroused new interest in the gifted hoy instead of indignation. The
teacher showed it to one of the leading artists in Paris, who implored
young MacDowell to leave off music and study art, assuring him that he
had unusual ability. But the lad also had a well-developed
discriminative faculty. He had chosen his ideal and could not he
persuaded to forsake it, preferring tone-pictures to those made with
brushes and palette.

Besides the Quaker strain, with its tendency toward dignity,
simplicity and openness to the leadings of spirit, he owes to his
Celtic lineage the mystic, poetic, dashing, unsophisticated vein that
might be easily mistaken for caprice, and to his American birth is
due, no doubt, many of the more solid, practical characteristics that