cations, their ponderous and opaque phraseology, their individual and very bad German, would seemingly resist translation, but Mr. Ellis wrestled with the task, accomplished it, and even emerged to praise Wagner's style, praise which has found no echo. The Life, of course, should have been a masterpiece; as a matter of fact, it is far from being a failure. Autobiography, even at its worst, is possibly the most enthralling form of literature. But compare the sparkling chapters of Benvenuto Cellini with the halting, obscure, and deliberately untruthful pages in Richard Wagner's account of his life and you will feel, somehow, that you have been cheated. And yet Wagner probably had more to tell than Cellini. The frank account of the Wesendonck affair, the full details of his ménage with the virgin king, a glowing narrative of his capture of Cosima von Bülow, in themselves would have supplied the material for a remarkable triptych in the manner of George Moore's Hail and Farewell, but Wagner could not put it down. He did not know how to write, and there was too much that he desired to conceal or gloss. James Huneker, Catulle Mendes, and a dozen others have done it better.
Gluck's preface to Alceste scarcely gives him claim to serious consideration as a writer. Mozart's letters, which are best perused in the vol-
