Her sufferings were terrible.  Convulsions and fainting-fits followed each other in swift succession, and it was evident that her end was near.  The news of her fatal illness excited the deepest sympathy and sorrow throughout England and France, and bulletins of her condition were issued every day.  Pending the arrival of her own physician, Dr. Belluomini, from London, she had been bled while in a fainting-fit by two local practitioners.  When she recovered her senses, she said, “I am a slain woman, for they have bled me!” She died on September 23, 1836, and De Beriot’s name was the last word that parted her pallid lips.

The death of this great and idolized singer produced a painful shock throughout Europe, and was regarded as a public calamity, for she had been as much admired and beloved as a woman as she was worshiped as an artist.  Her remains, first interred in Manchester, were afterward removed by her husband to Brussels, where he raised a circular memorial chapel to her memory at Lacken.  Her statue, chiseled in white marble by Geefs, represents her as Norma, and stands in the center, faintly lit by a single sunbeam admitted from a dome, and surrounded by masses of shadow.  “It appears,” says the Countess de Merlin, “like a fantastic thought, the dream of a poet.”

Maria Malibran was unquestionably one of the most gifted and remarkable women who ever adorned the lyric stage.  The charm of her singing consisted in the peculiarity of the timbre and the remarkable range of her voice, in her excitable temperament, which prompted her to execute the most audacious improvisations, and in her strong musical feeling, which kept her improvisations within the laws of good taste.  Her voice, a mezzo-soprano, with a high soprano range superadded by incessant work and training, was in its middle register very defective, a fault which she concealed by her profound musical knowledge and technical skill.  It was her mind that helped to enslave her hearers; for without mental originality and a distinct sort of creative force her defective voice would have failed to charm, where in fact it did provoke raptures.  She was, in the exact sense of a much-abused adjective, a phenomenal singer, and it is the misfortune of the present generation that she died too young for them to hear.

WILHELMINA SCHROeDER-DEVRIENT.

Mme. Schroeder-Devrient the Daughter of a Woman of Genius.—­Her Early Appearance on the Dramatic Stage in Connection with her Mother.—­She studies Music and devotes herself to the Lyric Stage.—­Her Operatic Debut in Mozart’s “Zauberflote.”—­Her Appearance and Voice.—­Mlle. Schroeder makes her Debut in her most Celebrated Character, Fidelio.—­Her own Description of the First Performance.—­A Wonderful Dramatic Conception.—­Henry Chorley’s Judgment of her as a Singer and Actress.—­She marries Carl Devrient at Dresden.—­Mme. Schroeder-Devrient makes herself celebrated as a Representative of Weber’s