gives the following description of the
musical talents of his fellow passengers:

One played the accordion, another the violin, and
another (who usually began at six o'clock a.m.) the key
bugle: the combined effect of which instruments, when
they all played different tunes, in different parts
of the ship, at the same time, and within hearing of
each other, as they sometimes did (everybody being
intensely satisfied with his own performance), was
sublimely hideous.

He does not tell us whether he was one of the performers on
these occasions.

But although he failed as an instrumentalist he took
delight in hearing music, and was always an appreciative yet
critical listener to what was good and tuneful. His favourite
composers were Mendelssohn--whose _Lieder_ he was specially
fond of[1]--Chopin, and Mozart. He heard Gounod's _Faust_
whilst he was in Paris, and confesses to having been quite
overcome with the beauty of the music. 'I couldn't bear it,'
he says, in one of his letters, 'and gave in completely. The
composer must be a very remarkable man indeed.' At the same
time he became acquainted with Offenbach's music, and heard
_Orphee aux enfers_. This was in February, 1863. Here also he
made the acquaintance of Auber, 'a stolid little elderly man,
rather petulant in manner.' He told Dickens that he had lived
for a time at 'Stock Noonton' (Stoke Newington) in order to
study English, but he had forgotten it all. In the description
of a dinner in the _Sketches_ we read that

The knives and forks form a pleasing accompaniment to
Auber's music, and Auber's music would form a pleasing
accompaniment to the dinner, if you could hear anything
besides the cymbals.

He met Meyerbeer on one occasion at Lord John Russell's. The
musician congratulated him on his outspoken language on Sunday
observance, a subject in which Dickens was deeply interested,
and on which he advocated his views at length in the papers
entitled _Sunday under Three Heads_.

Dickens was acquainted with Jenny Lind, and he gives the
following amusing story in a letter to Douglas Jerrold, dated
Paris, February 14, 1847:

I am somehow reminded of a good story I heard the
other night from a man who was a witness of it and
an actor in it. At a certain German town last autumn
there was a tremendous _furore_ about Jenny Lind, who,
after driving the whole place mad, left it, on her
tra