play and the music with more interest than did their
master. The Prince lay back in his chair, watching the piece listlessly
through the gauzy screen, and listening half heedlessly to the
music--the wonderful music of Pergolesi.

The fairy world of song and harmony, peopled by fantastic and impossible
creatures who exist only for the sake of the melodies which give them
birth, was not devoid of powerful and pathetic phases of passion and of
character; but what made its lesson particularly adapted to the Prince's
frame of mind, and gradually aroused his languid interest, was the
subordination of passion and character to the nicest art. The deepest
sorrow warbled to exquisite airs; passion, despairing and bewildered,
flinging itself as an evil thing across the devious paths of Romance,
yet never for a second forgetful of the nicest harmony or capable of a
jarring note. This ideal musical world--bizarre and rococo as, in some
respects, it was--seemed to the Prince in some sort an allegory, or even
parody, on the art-life he had set himself to create or to perfect. He
thought he saw that even its faults were instinct with, and revealed,
the secret of which he was in search. Faultiness and feebleness, folly
and littleness, seemed restrained, corrected, transformed, when
presented in solemn, noble, and pure melodies. Everything in this parody
of life was ruled by art just as, in the so-called reality, he had
wished. The lesson was not altogether a noble one. Passion, ennobled by
art, lost its fatal, repellent aspect, and became perfect as an artistic
whole. Here the poison worked readily in the Prince's mind. To sacrifice
the least portion of this art-life to any narrow illiterate scruples was
to sin against its perfection, without which the whole structure were
worthless. Better, far better, throw the entire scheme to the winds.
Imperfect art is worse than none at all. He had already forgotten, if he
had ever listened to it, Carricchio's warning against unreal and
loveless art.

Moreover, as the play went on, and the fantastic adventures and fortunes
of its strange actors gradually won the Prince's attention and attracted
his interest, through the gauzy veil of the curtains and the haze of
delicious melody, his desire was excited and he longed to play out his
own part on a real stage, and with tangible, no longer ideal, delights
and success. Why did he sit there gazing at a mere show of life, when
life itself, in a form st