attack, turning them over with earnest solicitude
in his mind. Supposing a composer
comes to tell him— " At this point," showing
him his score, " you will let otf three salvos ;
here must you carry an encore," — he would
make answer with unmoved aplomb, " Monsieur,
it will be dangerous ! " or else, " It will
do ! " or, perhaps, " I will think it over. My
ideas are not matured upon the subject.
H'm — let me see. Have some amateurs to
lead off, and I will follow suit— if I see it
take, that is." Once he held out nobly
against a writer who wished to force from
him some of this dangerous applause. He
made him this answer : " Monsieur ! it cannot
be done ; you would compromise me
before the public ; before my professional
brethren, who well know that such things
cannot be. Your work presents enormous
difficulties in the conducting. I will bestow great
pains upon it ; but I cannot expose myself to
the risk of being hissed ! "

Besides this great man there flourished
others, perhaps not gifted with such dazzling
qualities, but still giants in their own peculiar
walk. There was Albert of the Opéra
Comique — Albert Le Grand, as he was
affectionately styled; and Sauton of the
Gymnase — Sauton the gay, the mirthful, the
social. Nor must David — King David, as
he was happily dubbed — be passed over, on
whom, in later times, fell the mantle of
Augustus. Hearken yet once again unto the
lively gossip of Maître Berlioz:—

"It is to Albert," says he, "that we owe
the touching custom of calling ALL the actors
before the curtain at the close of a new piece
—King David was not slack in following his
example — and, emboldened by his success,
actually added the device of calling out the
tenor three times in the course of the night."

Still, though directing rival establishments,
these three great men were raised above all
petty jealousies. " During their triumvirate,"
says our chronicler, "they did not imitate
the excesses that disgraced that of Antony,
Octavius, and Lepidus. Far from that: when
any of those terrible nights came round at
the Opéra — nights when a dazzling and even
epic victory must be won — Augustus, scorning
to trust to new and undisciplined levies,
would make an appeal to his brother triumvirs.
Proud of acting with so great a man,
they would at once agree to receive him as
their leader, and placed at his disposal—
Albert his heavy phalanx, Sauton his light
infantry, all filled with a noble ardour which
nothing could withstand. These choice troops,
forming one compact body, being drawn up in
the parterre the night before the performance,
Augustus the emperor, with his maps and
plans in his hand, would put them through a
laborious rehearsal, availing himself at times
of the hints of Antony and Lepidus — who, to
say the truth, had little to tell him, so
sure and swift was his coup-d'Å“il, so acute was
he in divining the schemes of the enemy."

Such is a description of the way they order
things in France; whether better or otherwise,
may seem doubtful enough.

MUMMY.

LET us put ourselves for a moment, as to
one little matter, in the position of the old
Egyptians. We English are a brilliant race,
illuminating all our neighbours; but, after our
light shall have waned, there is to come
darkness of mind over generations. We
are embalmed when dead — the rich in fine
odorous resins and gums — the poor in stinking
pitch. Very well. Three thousand years
hence the rich man of to-day shall be sought,
the poor avoided. Bill Stokes shall either
lie at rest in his pitch, or be made up
into cheap physic for the poor; but such is
not the fate reserved for you, my Lord
Tomnoddy, who shall be as delicately embalmed
and scented after death as you are during
life; or for you, right honourable
minister of state or fair lady of fashion. For
you, or some of you, there is reserved a
better destiny. You will be highly prized
after the lapse of thirty centuries. A piece
as heavy as three barleycorns of the
embalmed cheek of Lady Thirtyflounce, will be
snuffed into some noble nose, together with a
little marjoram water, as a cure for head-ache.
A piece as heavy as one barleycorn of
a parliamentary orator, perhaps, dropped into
the ear with a little oil, will be a cure for
ear-ache; or four barleycorns of him will
make a gargle for sore throat. Four barleycorns,
it may be, of a noble sot, will be taken
in aromatic water as a cure for hiccup. A
small fragment of a sarcastic leader of
opposition may be the bit of mummy that shall
hereafter be mixed with butter, and used as
a remedy against the bites of scorpions. Other
fragments of the choicer sort of mummy—
bits of a dead rake, perhaps — shall be burnt, to
allay, with their smoke, the griefs of women.

Thus the old Egyptians were used in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and had
not ceased to be used even at a later period.
In a list of the medicines of the day,
published at Nuremberg, in the year sixteen
hundred and seventy-two, by Georg Niclaus
Schurz, in a Material-Kammer — or, as
doctors would now say, a Materia Medica — that
was then highly esteemed, we find written of
mummy, that " It is the embalmed bodies of
men or man's flesh brought from Egypt, in
the neighbourhood of Memphis. There are
many caves and graves there, in which one
finds a great number of dead bodies that
have been buried for more than a thousand
years, and these are called Mumia: such
have been embalmed with costly salves and
balsams, for they smell strongly of myrrh,
aloes, and other fragrant things. These are
brought into Italy, France, and also
Germany, and used as medicine. Now they come
to us in a remarkable manner: namely, the