The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1

fairs he had were hardly happy; his suit was either declined with thanks, or, if accepted, ended in the death of the lady; as for himself-being a god, he was denied the comfortable convenience of

er son was Aesculapius. Which explains th

Plato's statement that "the greatest caution is to be taken not to suffer any change in well-moraled music, there being no corruption of manners in a republic so great as that which follows a gradual declination from a

s nurse could not find a compliment for him, and in fact dropped him and ran. Considering what one usually expects of a new-born infant, Pan must have been really unattractive. His lack of personal charm was the origin of the invention of Pan's pipes or syrinx. Miss Syrinx of the Naiad family-one of the first families of Arcadia-was so horrified when Pan proposed to her, that she fled. He pursued and she begged aid of certain ny

one except himself, and therein to have had no rivals. The famous fish story to the effect that when he was compelled to leap i

roperty. He was torn to pieces by frantic women, a fate that seems always to threaten

atonic affair with an angel; which caused her pagan husband a certain amount of natural anxiety.

hem-though happily not all. Abélard, for instance, was a monk, and his Héloise became a nun, and their love letters are among the most precious possessions in literature. Liszt, that Hungarian rhapsodist in amours, was he not also an abbé? There was a priest-musician, George de la Hèle, who about 1585 gave up a lucrative benefice to marry a woman dowered with the name Madalena Guabaelaraoen. But

of the disastrous infatuation of Angelus Politianus, who flourished in 1460 as

of an illustrious family, but whom he could neither corrupt by his great presents, nor by the force of his eloquence. The vexation he conceived at this disappointment was so great as to throw him into a burning fever; and in the violence of the fit he made two

Hamlet in a Western theatre, where, there being no orchestra, he was co