ways found a more ardent sympathy with the higher forms of music. "The
florid graces and embellishments of the modern Italian school," says a
capable judge, "though mastered by her with perfect ease, do not appear
to be consonant with her genius. So great an artist must necessarily be
a perfect mistress of all styles of singing, but her intellect evidently
inclines her to the severer and loftier school." She was admitted to be
a "woman of genius, peculiar, inasmuch as it is universal."

Her English engagement at the Royal Italian Opera, in 1848, began with
the performance of _Amina_ in "La Sonnambula," and created a great
sensation, for she was about to contest the suffrages of the public with
a group of the foremost singers of the world, among whom were Grisi,
Alboni, and Persiani. Mme. Viardot's nervousness was apparent to all.
"She proved herself equal to Malibran," says a writer in the "Musical
World," speaking of this performance; "there was the same passionate
fervor, the same absorbing depth of feeling; we heard the same tones
whose naturalness and pathos stole into our very heart of hearts; we saw
the same abstraction, the same abandonment, the same rapturous awakening
to joy, to love, and to devotion. Such novel and extraordinary passages,
such daring nights into the region of fioriture, together with chromatic
runs ascending and descending, embracing the three registers of the
soprano, mezzo-soprano, and contralto, we have not heard since the days
of Malibran." Another critic made an accurate gauge of her peculiar
greatness in saying: "Mme. Viardot's voice grows unconsciously upon you,
until at last you are blind to its imperfections. The voice penetrates
to the heart by its sympathetic tones, and you forget everything in it
but its touching and affecting quality. You care little or nothing for
the mechanism, or rather, for the weakness of the organ. You are no
longer a critic, but spellbound by the hand of genius, moved by the
sway of enthusiasm that comes from the soul, abashed in the presence of
intellect."

The most memorable event of this distinguished artist's life was her
performance, in 1849, of the character of _Fides_ in "Le Prophete." No
operatic creation ever made a greater sensation in Paris. Meyerbeer had
kept it in his portfolio for years, awaiting the time when Mme. Viardot
should be ready to interpret it, and many changes had been made from
time to time at the suggestion of the great singer, w