the precipice beyond at its highest part, with the fine monolith left in the centre of the court. The scale, however, is too small to give an adequate idea of magnitude, though, after a short inspection with a lens, the details can be made out. The plan, however, best shows the general design of this wonderful place, and its beautiful proportions. There is an octagonal entrance hall, a great central hall, and sanctuary under the Vimana, in which is the Lingam ;' and the five separate chapels which surround the Vimana are upon a terrace, on the same level with the great hall, thirty feet perhaps or more above the level of the

court.

After all, let the imagination stretch as it will, it is not able to comprehend or realise the vast labour and perseverance which has completed minutely, and frequently, as is seen on the pillars of the great hall, with exquisite finish more resembling work in metal than in stone-the profuse ornamentation of this unique temple. Mr. Fergusson is perfectly correct in saying that the architecture is of the southern type, and yet it has a style and character of its own. Whether it preceded any attempt at building, or followed a style of architecture coeval with Buddhist excavation, known in the Pandava kingdom of the south, it is hard to decide. Under the civilised rule of the Pandyan dynasty, which is traceable through its connexion with the Greeks to the fifth century before Christ, architectural construction may have made more progress than in the north, and may even have attained much perfection; and specimens of very ancient temples in Mysore, and at Madura and other places, favour the supposition. However this may be, the style of Kylas, as to ornament and plan, resembles that of the beautiful temple at Houndah near Hingolée and that at Dhamnar. At the same time many of the older forms, found in the Buddhist Viharas, and earlier Hindu excavations, are repeated in Kylas, which thus combines the most notable peculiarities of cave and temple architecture in a very interesting manner.

When we consider how easily accessible these interesting monuments of antiquity are, and how well they would repay a visit, we are surprised that a portion of the annual English exodus does not take the direction of the Dekhan. Leaving England in September, or October at the latest, the whole winter could be spent delightfully in the pleasant Dekhan climate. Bombay is reached under a month, and thence to the scenes we have slightly sketched in the beginning of this article-Aurungabad, Dowlatabad, and Ellora-is a pleasant journey, partly by rail and partly by post transit through an

interesting country. If after that the progress be slower, it is always interesting; and there is plenty of hunting and shooting to help to pass the time. The plateau above Aurungabad used to be good ground for hog and all kinds of feathered game; and the sides and edges of the table-land, where there is jungle, for tigers and bears. We have little doubt of its being as good as ever in these respects. Should it be desirable to extend the tour, Beeder, Hyderabad, Bijanuggur, and Bijapoor are within the limits of the Indian cold weather,' beyond which the Dekhan would not be pleasant. We desire to see such tours more frequently attempted by our intelligent countrymen and women, because we wish them to see and judge of average specimens of the Indian population for themselves; and that what has been effected by a British Government already, what is in progress, and what remains to be done in the way of improvement, education, and other civilising influences-may be understood. They would see an intelligent, industrious, and, in spite of incomprehensible idolatry and superstition, an amiable people. They would see good husbandry and a fertile country, and they would return with a conviction that the Mahrattas and Mahomedans who live there are a reasonably civilised people; not painting their faces, carrying tomahawks, marching on war trails, and dancing war or peace dances, according to the customs of North American Indians; but that they are the descendants of men who even before the ages of European antiquity had executed works of masterly skill, and who professed a religion which has exercised a prodigious influence over vast numbers of mankind.

ART. IV.--1. Carl Maria von Weber: ein Lebensbild. Von MAX MARIA VON WEBER. Leipzig: 1865.

2. Carl Maria von Weber: the Life of an Artist. From the German of his Son, Baron Max Maria von Weber. By J. PALGRAVE SIMPSON, M.A. London: 1865.

A

BOUT forty years have elapsed since the great German composer Carl Maria von Weber was prematurely arrested by the hand of death in the midst of a brilliant career. During this period his fame has not diminished. His 'Der Freischütz' and his Oberon' still maintain their position on the lyrical stage in England; his Euryanthe' and Preciosa' still boast an equal preeminence in his native country; and his instrumental compositions are still familiar to the whole musical world. But, beyond his works, little of the man is known. A sort of traditionary feeling survived in this country that the celebrated composer was a quiet, affectionate, domestic being, who was early carried off by consumption—but no more. His son, Baron Max Maria von Weber, has, after these long years, presented to the world a biography of his father, which, spite of the tendency to heaviness, diffuseness and incomprehensible psychological disquisitions, so characteristic of almost all German biographies-faults which have been greatly diminished in the English version-is replete with unusual interest.

Generally speaking, the lives of composers and musical artists are singularly devoid of stirring incidents, or, at all events, appear to be so from the scanty records of them which have been laid before the world. With Carl Maria von Weber it was far otherwise. Apart from his great and unquestionable genius, the composer may have been a very ordinary mortal, displaying only all the passions, loves, prejudices, susceptibilities, and sorrows of any less gifted man of a highly nervous and sensitive organisation. But Weber's lot was cast in such wise, that his path in life was perpetually crossed by remarkable events, and tinged with a peculiar colouring of romance. The story of his early years reads like a series of chapters from the adventures of a German Gil Blas; and the romance of his life lies in regions of society almost entirely distinct from the interesting sphere of art with which his name is connected.

M. de Weber, with materials in his hands which could not fail to bestow upon the biography of his father something of the air of an entertaining work of fiction, seems to have feared

incurring the reproach from his fellow-countrymen of having produced too light and agreeable a book to earn for him the title of a serious writer, and of being, as he has himself expressed it, zu nouvellistisch.' It is certainly hard upon the poor author, that, after having employed his best efforts to give the requisite weight of ballast to his book, he should have so utterly missed his aim, as not to have escaped the deprecated censure of his German readers, and to have produced a biography of his father which is entertaining as well as instructive. As may be naturally supposed, M. de Weber has been enabled to command the most minute as well as authentic information relative to his father's life; and he has sufficiently mastered the state of parties in political as well as artistic circles, and the general condition of society at the period of which he writes, to explain the bearing of the political and social circumstances of the times upon the general cultivation of the earlier part of the present century-musical cultivation having of course a prominent place-and their direct or indirect influence on the mind and genius of one of the greatest and most popular composers of the age. A sufficient period has elapsed between the death of the father and the researches of the son to allow the acrimony of party feelings, the artistic enmities and rivalries, and the strange mixture of political influences which distracted the troubled career of the composer, to have subsided. Every facility appears in the present day to have been afforded to the author. Correspondences with celebrities of the time were liberally communicated; for Carl Maria von Weber had always been a ready letter-writer and prolific in newspaper criticism; although, strange to say, an autobiography written by himself, and a diary which the industrious artist never failed to compile for a long series of years, almost to the last hour of his life, afforded comparatively little assistance to the biographer. The former was found scanty in detail, and not without certain suspicious reticences; the latter, although profuse in small domestic records, was singularly deficient in remarks upon the more important incidents of the musician's

career.

With all these facilities afforded to the son in the compilation of a biography of his father, one important requisite for such a task might naturally have been wanting, that of thorough impartiality. But M. de Weber soon convinces his readers of the groundlessness of any such suspicion: he has dealt with his father, and indeed with all his connexions, with a degree of impartiality which borders on the marvellous, and, reveals a rare and, it may be said, almost unscrupulous

conscientiousness. This impartiality is not only conspicuous in the author's judgment of his father's artistic powers, but is carried, in other matters, to an extent which savours of exaggeration. It is difficult to get rid of the feeling, that the youthful follies and errors of the father might have been treated by the son with a more delicate handling, or, at all events, with something less of a frankness which almost amounts to crudity. When, however, failings of temper and the weaknesses of excessive susceptibility in the celebrated composer are justly ascribed to the impulsiveness of a genial character and a kindly heart, a general impression of truth is conveyed; and a conviction of the author's impartiality is thoroughly maintained. In one respect only, a tendency to exaggeration is visible. Carl Maria von Weber, doubtless, suffered much from his perpetual struggles against the evil influences of his youth, poverty and privations, the world's trials, enmities, jealousies, and, above all, the hostile intrigues of the masters and patrons of that Italian art which held the supremacy of fashion and favouritism at the time when these intrigues were employed to oppose the advancement of the German school of music, to the ends and aims of which his own life was devoted. But, much as his struggles for the good cause may have shattered a sensitive mind, and undermined a constitution always delicate, it is very evident that his biographer forms an undue estimate of these tribulations and annoyances, when he bestows on the gladiator in the arena of art the crown of a martyr.

That the life of the great composer was a troubled, and in many respects a painful one, is clear. Born into a family in which a joint passion for music and the stage had been hereditary for many generations, Carl Maria von Weber was, from the first, nursed in all the dramatic fancies which were eventually to lead the precocious boy to a high pinnacle of fame. He may be said to have been cradled on the stage. At the time of his birth, his father, who was possessed to a very extraordinary degree by the hereditary mania, had thrown up position, prospects of fortune, and all the ordinary decencies of life, to drag his numerous family by a former wife on the stage. This singular individual figures, in the earlier portions of the biography, more like the Turveydrop, Micawber, or Harold Skimpole of the novel-writer, than a reality. Vainglorious, bombastic, reckless, tormented by an inordinate vanity and an unsatisfied greed of name and fame, this father sought to make of his last born an infant prodigy. It is marvellous, on looking back to the period of Weber's childhood, to find that the brain of the young genius was not utterly ruined by its early forcing; just