exposed to the dust of the beaten highways.

He commenced the study of music at an early age, being but nine years
old when he began to learn it. Shortly after he was confided to a
passionate disciple of Sebastian Bach, Ziwna, who directed his studies
during many years in accordance with the most classic models. It is
not to be supposed that when he embraced the career of a musician, any
prestige of vain glory, any fantastic perspective, dazzled his eyes, or
excited the hopes of his family. In order to become a skillful and able
master, he studied seriously and conscientiously, without dreaming of
the greater or less amount of fame he would be able to obtain as the
fruit of his lessons and assiduous labors.

In consequence of the generous and discriminating protection always
granted by Prince Antoine Radziwill to the arts, and to genius, which
he had the power of recognizing both as a man of intellect and as
a distinguished artist; Chopin was early placed in one of the first
colleges in Warsaw. Prince Radziwill did not cultivate music only as
a simple dilettante, he was also a remarkable composer. His beautiful
rendering of Faust, published some years ago, and executed at fixed
epochs by the Academy of Song at Berlin, appears to us far superior to
any other attempts which have been made to transport it into the realm
of music, by its close internal appropriateness to the peculiar genius
of the poem. Assisting the limited means of the family of Chopin, the
Prince made him the inestimable gift of a finished education, of which
no part had been neglected. Through the person of a friend, M. Antoine
Korzuchowski, whose own elevated mind enabled him to understand the
requirements of an artistic career, the Prince always paid his pension
from his first entrance into college, until the completion of
his studies. From this time until the death of Chopin, M. Antoine
Korzuchowski always held the closest relations of friendship with him.

In speaking of this period of his life, it gives us pleasure to quote
the charming lines which may be applied to him more justly, than other
pages in which his character is believed to have been traced, but in
which we only find it distorted, and in such false proportions as are
given in a profile drawn upon an elastic tissue, which has been pulled
athwart, biased by contrary movements during the whole progress of the
sketch. [Footnote: These extracts, with many that succeed them, in which
the