passages of exquisite grace and beauty. It is true that in the selection
of his subjects from ancient fable, Gaetano Pisani was much more
faithful than his contemporaries to the remote origin and the early
genius of Italian Opera.

That descendant, however effeminate, of the ancient union between Song
and Drama, when, after long obscurity and dethronement, it regained a
punier sceptre, though a gaudier purple, by the banks of the Etrurian
Arno, or amidst the lagunes of Venice, had chosen all its primary
inspirations from the unfamiliar and classic sources of heathen legend;
and Pisani's "Descent of Orpheus" was but a bolder, darker, and more
scientific repetition of the "Euridice" which Jacopi Peri set to music
at the august nuptials of Henry of Navarre and Mary of Medicis.* Still,
as I have said, the style of the Neapolitan musician was not on the
whole pleasing to ears grown nice and euphuistic in the more dulcet
melodies of the day; and faults and extravagances easily discernible,
and often to appearance wilful, served the critics for an excuse for
their distaste. Fortunately, or the poor musician might have starved,
he was not only a composer, but also an excellent practical performer,
especially on the violin, and by that instrument he earned a decent
subsistence as one of the orchestra at the Great Theatre of San Carlo.
Here formal and appointed tasks necessarily kept his eccentric fancies
in tolerable check, though it is recorded that no less than five times
he had been deposed from his desk for having shocked the conoscenti,
and thrown the whole band into confusion, by impromptu variations of so
frantic and startling a nature that one might well have imagined that
the harpies or witches who inspired his compositions had clawed hold of
his instrument.

The impossibility, however, to find any one of equal excellence as a