MALIBRAN, MARIA FELICITE,
Daughter of a singer and composer of music of some celebrity, of the name of Garcia, was born at Paris, March 24th., 1808. When scarcely five, she commenced her musical education at Naples, under the best masters. She sang in public, for the first time, in 1824, and so successfully as to give promise of attaining a very high order of excellence in her art. In 1825 she accompanied her father to England, where a sudden indisposition of Madame Pasta led to her performance, at a short notice, of the part of Rosina, in the Barber of Seville. The highly satisfactory manner in which she acquitted herself, secured to her an engagement for the season in London; and she sang afterwards in Manchester, Liverpool, and York. Her father, having been induced to go to the United States, took his daughter with him, as the prima donna of his operatic corps. There her success was unbounded, and she qualified herself by the most assiduous study, for competing, on her return to Europe, with the most celebrated singers of the time.
In March, 1826, she married at New York, a French merchant of the name of Malibran, more than double her own age, but who was thought very wealthy. Soon after the marriage he became a bankrupt; and the cold and selfish reliance he placed on her musical powers, as a means of re-establishing his ruined fortunes, so offended the feelings of his wife, that she left him, and went to France in September, 1827.
After two years of a most brilliant career in Paris and the departments, she accompanied Lablache on a professional tour through Italy. Her winters were afterwards passed in Paris, and her summers in excursions in different directions. In 1835, the French court pronounced her marriage with M. Malibran to have been ab initio null and void, not having been contracted before an authority regarded as competent by the French law. In 1836, she married M. de Bériot, the celebrated violinist, and went with him to Brussels to reside. In consequence of an injury received by a fall from a horse a few weeks after her marriage, her health began to decline; and, having come to England during the summer, she was suddenly attacked by a nervous fever, after singing at a musical festival at Manchester, contrary to the advice of her physicians. Her enfeebled constitution was unable to resist the progress of the disease, and she died, September 23rd., 1836, at the age of twenty-eight.
MANDANE,
Daughter of Astyages and wife of Cambyses, receives her highest honour from being the mother of Cyrus the Great. Herodotus asserts that the birthright and glory of Cyrus came from his mother, and that his father was a man of obscure birth. This is partly confirmed by history, which records that Astyages, who was King of Media, dreamed that from the womb of his daughter Mandane, then married to Cambyses, King of Persia, there sprung up a vine which spread over all Asia. Cyrus was such a son as must have gladdened his mother's heart; and we must believe his mother was worthy of him. She lived B.C. 599.
MANLEY, MRS.,
The author of "The Atalantis," was the daughter of Sir Roger
