adopted ward of a prince. De Beriot travelled
little after this, and lived to be sixty-eight years old. He died in
blindness that had been creeping on him for the last eighteen years of
his life.

CHAPTER V.

AN OMNIBUS CHAPTER

"Passions are like dogs: the big ones need more food than the little
ones."--HENRY T. FINCK, "_Romantic Love and Personal Beauty_."

There is both temptation and material enough for as many musical love
stories, as there are novels in the handwriting of Sir Walter Scott,
but this being a limited work, the covers already begin to bulge and
creak, and it will be necessary to crowd into one swift mail-coach such
other composers as we can hardly afford to leave behind.

In some cases, this summary treatment is all the easier because little
or nothing is known of their love affairs, while in others it will be
purely a case of regretful omission. It is the chief difficulty and the
chief regret, whom and what to omit. There are composers whom to
neglect argues oneself ignorant, yet who composed no love affair of
immortal charm. There are composers of whom few ever heard, whose
_magnum opus_ was some romance that still makes the heart-strings
tingle by the acoustic law of sympathetic vibration. For example, there
are two old crusading troubadours.

CERTAIN TROUBADOURS

You never heard, perhaps, of Geoffrey Rudel, who "died for the charms
of an imaginary mistress." He fell in love with the Countess of
Tripoli, never having seen her. He loved the very fame of her beauty.
He set sail for the East, and endured the agonies of travel of those
days. Whether anticipation was better than realisation, we cannot know
to-day, having no portrait of the countess; but at least anticipation
was more fatal, for it wrought him into such a fever, that when at last
Tripoli was reached, he was carried ashore dying. The countess had
heard of his pilgrimage, and had hastened to greet him, only to be
permitted to clasp his hand and to hear him gasp, with his last breath:
"Having seen thee, I die satisfied."

There is a distressing ambiguity about the troubadour's last words.

And so there was the other troubadour, the Chatelain Regnault de Coucy.
His mistress was a married woman, whom he left to go to the Third
Crusade. In the inveterate siege of Acre, he was mortally wounded
before those odious Paynim walls; but, with his dying breath, he begged
that his heart be taken from his breast and sent home to he