singers!"

Mme. Mara continued to sing for many years in different cities of
Europe, though the recollections and traditions of her marvelous prime
were more attractive than the then active powers of her voice. But her
consummate art never deserted her, in spite of the fact that her voice
became more and more a wreck. She appeared in public occasionally till
her seventy-second year, when she retired to Cassel, her birthplace,
where she died in 1833, at the age of eighty.


V.

Another of Mrs. Billington's most brilliant rivals and contemporaries
was the lovely Giuseppa Grassini, a wayward, indolent, fascinating
beauty, who had taken France and Italy by storm before she attempted to
subdue the more obdurate and phlegmatic Britons. The daughter of a
small farmer in Lombardy, the charm of her voice and appearance induced
General Belgioso to pay the cost of her musical training, and at the age
of nineteen she sprang into popularity at a bound with her _début_ at La
Scala in 1794. In spite of the fact that she was associated with two of
the greatest Italian singers of the time--Crescentini, one of the last
of the male sopranos, and Marchesi--she became the cynosure of public
admiration. She was surrounded by homage and flattery sufficient to have
turned a more sedate temperament and wiser head than her own, and her
name became mixed with some of the most piquant scandals of the period.

In spite of ignorance, indolence, and a caprice which she never
attempted to control, Grassini was an exquisite artist; and, though dull
and shallow intellectually in all matters apart from her profession, she