Note 51 — THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED

It is a fashion among the scientific or pedantic part of the musical world to decry Miss Stephens’s singing as feeble and insipid. This it is to take things by their contraries. Her excellence does not lie in force or contrast, but in sweetness and simplicity. To give only one instance. Any person who does not feel the beauty of her singing the lines in Artaxerxes, ‘What was my pride is now my shame,’ &c., in which the notes seem to fall from her lips like languid drops from the bending flower, and her voice flutters and dies away with the expiring conflict of passion in her bosom, may console himself with the possession of other faculties, but assuredly he has no ear for music.