were present will ever forget how he attended the banquet that same evening, in such full possession of his faculties and bodily strength as to make his own reply to the hundreds assembled to celebrate the occasion? Could anything have been finer than this sight of Grand Old Age?

Now the fame of each individual member of the Garcia family would seem to demand that, in addition to the story of the Maestro's own career, considerable details should be given regarding that of his father and sisters. Surely the three last have claims to our attention beyond the mere fact of being in the one case a parent who exercised a very important influence upon Manuel Garcia's character and choice of career in early days, and who was, moreover, the fountainhead from which flowed the stream of musical talent that in the children broadened out into so grand a river,—in the other case, the sisters, who were bound not only by ties of kinship but by a debt of gratitude for the part which their brother played in their vocal training.

This brings us to the first point, Señor Garcia's position as a teacher. There is a trite proverb to the effect that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. It is so in the present case. One can state the fact that he has been a great master, one can lay down a general outline of his teaching and applaud the soundness of his methods, but after all the outer world will in such matters be apt to judge by results alone. Or let us put it in another way. His knowledge is like the foundations of a house: experts may examine it closely and admire good points, but to a great extent the successes of his pupils are the bricks by which alone a wide reputation is built up.

For this reason I propose to sketch briefly the career of the more famous among those who studied under the old Spaniard, and in doing so I trust that the above circumstances will be considered sufficient excuse for the digressions which will be made at various points.

We now come to a second consideration.

The discovery of the laryngoscope, owing to its far-reaching results, is of such importance that the chapter dealing with it is bound to contain matter which will naturally appeal to the special rather than to the general reader. The desire that the many may not suffer for the sake of the few to a greater extent than is absolutely necessary has prompted me to quote but briefly from the text of the important technical papers which he presented to the Royal Society in 1854 and to the International Medical Congress in 1881.

In the former of these he sets forth a detailed account of the results which he himself obtained in connection with the human voice from the use of the instrument; in the latter he has told the story of the invention and given a full description of the laryngoscope.

Last of all, there is the question of his remarkable age. As a centenarian, he passed through many great historical events, and witnessed a number of changes not only in the musical world, but in the general advance of civilisation. To mention but a few cases of the former: his childhood in Spain was passed amid the scenes of the Napoleonic invasion, followed by those of the Peninsular War, while his boyhood in Naples caused him to witness the execution of the ex-king Murat, a few months after the despotic brother-in-law's final overthrow at Waterloo. His first visit to England was made when George III. was on the throne; his nineteenth year saw the death of Louis XVIII.; while his arrival in America to take part in the first season of Italian opera ever given there was at a time when New York was a town of 150,000 inhabitants, and the United States were preparing to celebrate the jubilee of the Declaration of Independence. In early manhood he joined the French Expedition against Algiers, and on his return found himself in the midst of the July Revolution, which resulted in the expulsion of Charles X. from the capital and the placing of Louis Philippe on the throne; while he spent his last months in Paris as a member of the National Guard during another revolution, that of 1848, which ended in the flight of Louis and the proclamation of the French Republic.

The first fifteen years of residence in London saw the English nation throw down the glove to Russia, enter on the Crimean War, and bring it to a successful close with the fall of Sebastopol, which was followed by such events as the Indian Mutiny; the accession of William I. to the throne of Prussia, with Prince Bismarck as his chief adviser; the capture of Pekin; the American Civil War; the death of the Prince Consort, and two years later the marriage of the heir to the throne of England to the beautiful Princess of the Royal House of Denmark.

He was in his sixty-first year when Lord Palmerston died; as for the Franco-Prussian War and the Siege of Paris, they were looked on by him in his old age as things of but yesterday; while at various periods of his life he resided in Madrid, Naples, Paris, New York, Mexico, and London.

Again, in his work as a teacher, there came for lessons not merely the children of old pupils, but many even whose parents and grandparents had studied under him; while before his life was brought to a close England had been ruled by five successive sovereigns.

His father, whom we shall refer to in this Memoir as the elder Garcia, was born at Seville on January 22, 1775—over a hundred and thirty years ago. At the time of his birth Seville could not boast a single piano. Such a thing seems hardly credible to us who live in the twentieth century, when it is the exception rather than the rule to come across a house that does not boast an instrument, which is at any rate sufficiently recognisable from its general contour for one to feel justified in saying, "Let it pass for a piano."

Whence the elder Garcia obtained his musical talent it is impossible to learn. Whatever the previous generations may have been, there is no record of their having made any mark among the musicians of their time. Garcia is a fairly common Spanish name, and we find mention of several musicians of the eighteenth century, and even earlier, who bore that cognomen; none of these, however, can possibly have had any direct relationship to the family in which we are interested, and for an obvious reason. "Garcia" was only a nom de guerre which had been taken by the founder of the family when he entered upon a musical career, his baptismal name having been Manuel Vicente del Popolo Rodriguez. The fame of the new name, however, soon eclipsed the old, and hence in due course it came to be adopted by him and his descendants as their regular surname.

In the spring of 1781 the "elder" Garcia, being now six years old, became a chorister in the cathedral of his native town. Here he quickly began to display an extraordinary talent and precocity, his first musical training being received at the hands of Antonio Ripa, and continued under Juan Almarcha, who succeeded Ripa as Maestro di Cappella at the cathedral. These two men were considered the first teachers in Seville, and under their able tuition his powers developed so rapidly, that even in his early teens he was already acquiring a reputation in his town not only as singer, but as composer and chef d'orchestre.

During the years which Garcia was thus spending in patient study, the neighbouring kingdom of France was approaching nearer and nearer to that vast upheaval which was to bring such fatal consequences. The populace had long been smouldering with discontent against the hated aristocrats, and at last in 1789 the country flamed up in that terrible revolution which culminated in that wonderful episode, the storming of the Bastille on July 14.

When this historical event took place the elder Garcia was in his fifteenth year. Two years later he made his début at the theatre of Cadiz in a "tonadilla" into which a number of his own compositions had been introduced. Not long after this he