174 PRÆTERITA-I

lilacs and laburnums of Herne Hill: and held themselves, with their brother Henry, always ready at call to come out on any occasion of the hill’s hospitality to some respected correspondent of the House, and sing to us the prettiest airs from the new opera, with a due foundation and tonic intermixture of classical German.

Henry had a singularly beautiful tenor voice; and the three sisters, though not, any one of them, of special power, sang their parts with sufficient precision, with intelligent taste, and with the pretty unison of sisterly voices. In this way, from early childhood, I was accustomed to hear a great range of good music completely and rightly rendered, without breakings down, missings out, affectations of manner, or vulgar prominence of execution. Had the quartette sung me English glees, or Scotch ballads, or British saltwater ones, or had any one of the girls had gift enough to render higher music with its proper splendour, I might easily have been led to spare some time from my maps and mineralogy for attentive listening. As it was, the scientific German compositions were simply tiresome to me, and the pretty modulations of Italian, which I understood no syllable of, pleasant only as the trills of the blackbirds, who often listened, and expressed their satisfaction by joining in the part-songs through the window that opened to the back garden in the spring evenings. Yet the education of my ear and taste went on without trouble of mine. I do not think I ever heard any masterly professional music, until, as good hap was, I heard the best, only to be heard during a narrow space of those young days.

201. I too carelessly left without explanation the casual sentence about “fatal dinner at Mr. Domecq’s” when I was fourteen, above, Chap. IV., § 94.¹ My father’s Spanish partner was at that time living in the Champs Élysées, with his English wife and his five daughters; the eldest, Diana, on the eve of her marriage with one of Napoleon’s

¹ [See above, p. 85 and n.]

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