giant of Europe. Rossini, Meyerbeer, Weber, Schumann--in a word, the
representatives of the most diverse schools of composition--bowed
equally before this great name. Rossini, who was his antipodes in genius
and method, felt his loss bitterly, and after his death sent Cherubini's
portrait to his widow with these touching words: "Here, my dear madam,
is the portrait of a great man, who is as young in your heart as he is
in my mind."

Actively engaged as Director of the Conservatory, which he governed with
consummate ability, his old age was further employed in producing that
series of great masses which rank with the symphonies of Beethoven. His
creative instinct and the fire of his imagination remained unimpaired
to the time of his death. Mendelssohn in a letter to Moscheles speaks
of him as "that truly wonderful old man, whose genius seems bathed
in immortal youth." His opera of "Ali Baba," composed at seventy-six,
though inferior to his other dramatic works, is full of beautiful and
original music, and was immediately produced in several of the principal
capitals of Europe; and the second Requiem mass, written in his
eightieth year, is one of his masterpieces.

On the 12th of March, 1842, the old composer died, surrounded by his
affectionate family and friends. His fatal illness had been brought on
in part by grief for the death of his son-in-law, M. Tureas, to whom he
was most tenderly attached. His funeral was one of great military and
civic magnificence, and royalty itself could not have been honored
with more splendid obsequies. The congregation of men great in arms
and state, in music, painting, and literature, who did honor to the
occasion, has rarely been equaled. His own noble Requiem mass, composed
the year before his death, was given at the funeral services in the
church of St. Roch by the finest orchestra and voices in Europe. Similar