the Popular Idol.--Her Last London Engagement.--Her Death at Manchester
during the Great Musical Festival.


I.

With the name of Malibran there is associated an interest, alike
personal and artistic, rarely equaled and certainly unsurpassed among
the traditions which make the records of the lyric stage so fascinating.
Daring originality stamped her life as a woman, her career as an artist,
and the brightness with which her star shone through a brief and stormy
history had something akin in it to the dazzling but capricious passage
of a meteor. If Pasta was the Siddons of the lyric drama, unapproachable
in its more severe and tragic phases, Malibran represented its Garrick.
Brilliant, creative, and versatile, she sang equally well in all styles
of music, and no strain on her resources seemed to overtax the power
of an artistic imagination which delighted in vanquishing obstacles and
transforming native defects into new beauties, an attribute of genius
which she shared in equal degree with Pasta, though it took on a
different manifestation.

This great singer belonged to a Spanish family of musicians, who have
been well characterized as "representative artists, whose power, genius,
and originality have impressed a permanent trace on the record of the
methods of vocal execution and ornament." Her father, Manuel Vicente
Garcia, at the age of seventeen, was already well known as composer,
singer, actor, and conductor. His pieces, short comic operas, had a
great popularity in Spain, and were not only bright and inventive,
but marked by thorough musical workmanship. A month after he made his
_début_ in Paris, in 1811, he had become the chief singer, and sang