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At this rate, all knowledge is to be had in a goody, and the end of it is an old song. We need not wonder when we hear from Monstrelet that Charles was a very well educated person. He could string Latin texts together by the hour, and make ballades and rondels better than Eustache Deschamps himself.

The player who rendered the Scherzo was advised to practise octaves with light, flexible wrist; the Kullak Octave School was recommended, especially the third book; the other books could be read through, practising whatever seemed difficult and passing over what was easy. Of the Ballades the first was termed more popular, the second finer and more earnest though neither makes very much noise.

For years this man has been going through all the gestures of the most serious sort of composition without adding one iota to musical art. For years he has been writing music apparently logical, clear, well-formed. His opus-numbers mount well toward two hundred. He has written symphonies, concertos for piano and violin, operas, cantatas, symphonic poems, suites, ballades, fantasies, caprices.

Thence he led me to the cloisters, into the chapter-house, through the vestry, where the brothers' gowns and broad straw hats were hanging up, each with his religious name upon a board names full of legendary suavity and interest, such as Basil, Hilarion, Raphael, or Pacifique; into the library, where were all the works of Veuillot and Chateaubriand, and the "Odes et Ballades," if you please, and even Molière, to say nothing of innumerable fathers and a great variety of local and general historians.

In his Grand Testament a poem of about 1500 lines, containing a number of interspersed ballades and rondeaus in his Petit Testament, and in a small number of miscellaneous poems, he has said all that he has to say. The most self-communicative of poets, he has impressed his own personality on every line that he wrote.

Nay, and it was in rhyme that he should learn rhyming: in the verses of his father's Maître d'Hôtel, Eustache Deschamps, which treated of l'art de dictier et de faire chançons, ballades, virelais et rondeaux, along with many other matters worth attention, from the courts of Heaven to the misgovernment of France.

James Huneker, the raconteur of the Musical Courier, discussing the compositions of Chopin, in his delightful and inspiring book, "Chopin, the Man and His Music," calls the studies Titanic experiments; the preludes, moods in miniature; the nocturnes, night and its melancholy mysteries; the ballades, faery dramas; the polonaises, heroic hymns of battle; the valses and mazurkas, dances of the soul; the scherzos, the work of Chopin the conqueror.

Read the E flat minor, the C minor, the A major, the F sharp minor and the two A flat major Polonaises! Ballades, Scherzi, Studies, Preludes and the great F minor Fantaisie are purposely omitted from this awing scheme. Chopin was weak in physique, but he had the soul of a lion.

With the ballade this seemed natural enough; for in connection with ballades the mind recurs to Villon, and Villon was almost more of a modern than de Banville himself. But in the case of the rondel, a comparison is challenged with Charles of Orleans, and the difference between two ages and two literatures is illustrated in a few poems of thirteen lines.

And yet there is an engaging frankness about these ballades which disarms criticism. You see Charles throwing himself headforemost into the trap; you hear Burgundy, in his answers begin to inspire him with his own prejudices, and draw melancholy pictures of the misgovernment of France.