elocutionist's point of view before you attack the musical side of the matter. A singer when singing in public should not be troubled with his words and music too.

General Education.—An important branch of study is that of giving expression to the passions, and of communicating your conceptions and emotions to the minds of your listeners. No better training could a young singer have for forming such ideas than the earnest perusal of the works of Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Milton, Lytton, George Eliot, &c.; or in watching carefully and intelligently the acting of our best stage performers. For a singer to be successful, he or she must be in a position to express, and bring home to an audience, such emotions as love, hatred, anger, fear, grief, and pity; all these, and many other such feelings, have constantly to be transmitted by the singer, and it is to the most natural and faithful exposition of these, and that most consistent with the other equally important points of the art of singing, that the student's attention should for a long while be patiently and perseveringly directed.

The singer should be a well-educated man, and he should know at least one other language beside his native tongue. He should be well read, too, in the best literature of these two languages. On questions of all the arts he should seek to make his views sound and true. He should seek to travel, and so enlarge his mind, for all this training will reflect itself in the work of an artist so liberally educated. An inferior education has been the bane of many a student, who has had the organ and all the necessary musical ability.

Dramatic Study.—To be a successful public singer, even in the concert-room, one must be more or less an actor; and, therefore, the time and money bestowed in acquiring a sound knowledge of dramatic action and elocution will be well spent. For the lyric stage, such a study is imperative; but its utility to artists who aspire no higher than to ballad or oratorio singing cannot be too highly estimated.

VOICES AND THEIR VARIOUS QUALITIES.

The life of the singing voice is so comparatively short, that the study of singing is rendered more difficult than that of any other art. You may buy a violin or a pianoforte, ready-made and perfect, in your childhood, and nothing remains for you but to study the instrument diligently under a good master. But the vocal instrument cannot be said to exist at all, for purposes of singing study, before the age of eighteen or twenty in males, and (in our climate) sixteen in females. Even at those ages the organ is necessarily immature and undeveloped. Consequently the study of the art has to be carried on during the progress of the instrument to maturity.

To counterbalance this disadvantage, however, we must bear in mind that that very study materially helps to perfect the instrument. Singing is by no means all "style," and the study of it includes the formation of the voice and production of a good tone, and it is, of course, easier to manipulate an unfinished article than a finished one—to educate youth and suppleness than to bring maturity and stiffness into subjection to new conditions.

Therefore begin your study in the youth of your voice; but, recollecting that its life is the most short-lived of your faculties, let your study be most earnest and painstaking. Especially if singing is to be your profession, act upon the wise advice of Dr. Burney, and "Never go to bed till you have learned something which you did not know the previous night."

Voices.—"What is your voice?" is a very common question, sometimes expressed in the rather less polite but more intelligent form, "What do you call your voice?" The answer almost invariably is either "Soprano," "Contralto," "Tenor," "Bass," or "Barytone." Here is a warning for you at starting. Do not limit your notions of what voices are to those four or five generic names. Because choral music is generally written in four parts, for soprano, alto, tenor, and bass, the non-musical public, and a great many musical people (some composers included) seem to think that those names are an inclusive description of every human voice.

This would be of very little consequence if it were only a question of names; but it is of no use to say "What is in a name?" if the result of a wrong name is to lead to mischief. The misfortune of wrongly naming your voice is that it will lead you to practise wrongly, and to choose the wrong style of music for study and performance. For instance, a young lady may call herself a soprano because she can "sing up to C," and may therefore fancy that the whole repertoire of a Tietjens or a Clara Novello is within her reach; and acting on this notion, she may fatally damage a naturally bright and pleasing voice by giving it work to do which belongs of right to a voice of totally different calibre, the mezzo-soprano.

Naming the Voice.—Remember always that the character of a voice is determined not by compass or range of notes, but by quality, or body and timbre, of tone. Two ladies may have voices ranging from A to A—two octaves—and yet one might be a pure light soprano, and the other a genuine contralto; while in length of compass a mezzo-soprano may even beat them both. And so with male voices (the variety in which is even greater than in female), you may have a voice of pure tenor quality, and yet of such limited compass that your energetic barytone friend next door may make your life miserable with jealousy of the ease with which he bellows high Gs, G sharps, and even on great occasions an A or so.

But compass has nothing whatever to do with the name of the voice: it may limit the quantity of music which can be performed, but it should have no influence on the choice of the style of music to be studied. This is a point of the greatest importance, therefore I repeat it briefly once more—Your voice must be described and used with reference to its quality, or volume and timbre, and not with reference to the number of notes which you can sing.

Male and Female Voices.—The actual varieties in tone and quality in different voices cannot, of course, be expressed on paper; but a careful use of your ears in listening to good public singers will soon teach you to discriminate. Female voices are of at least four kinds: soprano, mezzo-soprano, mezzo-contralto, and contralto. Male are of five or six, or even more. Alto; tenore-leggiero or light tenor; tenore-robusto or strong heavy-voiced tenor; barytone—basso-cantante (erroneously identified with the barytone by some persons); basso-profondo or bass.

Beside all these divisions or species, voices must be again classed according to their power. Any one who has ever heard an opera singer in a moderate-sized private drawing-room, will readily appreciate the difference between a voce di camera, or "chamber voice," and a voce di teatro.

Compass.—The respective compasses of the several voices may be roughly set down as follows, but it should be borne in mind that it is by no means a matter of course that a singer of any particular voice should possess or cultivate the whole range of notes supposed to belong to that voice. He or she may be none the less a tenor or a soprano because the one cannot produce an "Ut de poitrine," or the other "F in Alt." There is a special individuality in every voice, as in every face, and therefore every voice must be treated, by a good teacher, on its own merits, as a thing in some respects unique.

Perhaps it will be best, therefore, instead of saying that the compass of