in one of Paer’s operas, and here that she received her first lessons in music from M. Panseron and the composer Herold.  When Garcia quitted Italy in 1816, he sang with Catalani in Paris, but, as that jealous artist admitted no bright star near her own, Garcia soon left the troupe, and went to London in the spring of 1818.  He oscillated between the two countries for several years, and was the first brilliant exponent of the Rossinian music in two great capitals, as his training and method were peculiarly fitted to this school.  The indomitable energy and ambition which he transmitted to his daughters, who were to become such distinguished ornaments of the stage, were not contented with making their possessor a great executant, for he continued to produce operas, several of which were put on the stage in Paris with notable success.  Garcia’s name as a teacher commenced about the year 1823 to overshadow his reputation as a singer.  In the one he had rivals, in the other he was peerless.  His school of singing quickly became famous, though he continued to appear on the stage, and to pour forth operas of more than average merit.

The education of his daughter Maria, born at Paris, March 24, 1808, had always been a matter of paternal solicitude.  A delicate, sensitive, and willful child, she had been so humored and petted at the convent-school of Hammersmith, where she was first placed, that she developed a caprice and a recklessness which made her return to the house of her stern and imperious father doubly painful, lier experience was a severe one, and Manuel Garcia was more pitiless to his daughter than to other pupils.  Already at this period Maria spoke with ease Spanish, Italian, French, and English, to which she afterward added German.  The Garcia household was a strange one.  The Spanish musician was a tyrant in his home, and a savage temper, which had but few streaks of tenderness, frequently vented itself in blows and brutality, in spite of the remarkable musical facility with which Maria appropriated teaching, and the brilliant gifts which would have flattered the pride and softened the sympathies of a more gentle and complacent parent.  The young girl, in spite of her prodigious instinct for art and her splendid intelligence, had a peculiarly intractable organ.  The lower notes of the voice were very imperfect, the upper tones thin, disagreeable, and hard, the middle veiled, and her intonation so doubtful that it almost indicated an imperfect ear.  She would sometimes sing so badly that her father would quit the piano precipitately and retreat to the farthest corner of the house with his fingers thrust into his ears.  But Garcia was resolved that his daughter should become what Nature seemingly had resolved she should not be, a great vocalist, and he bent all the energies of his harsh and imperious temper to further this result.  “One evening I studied a duet with Maria,” says the Countess Merlin, “in which Garcia had written a passage, and he desired