But Soliva, who is a young man and full of the warmest admiration for Mozart, has imbibed certain tints of his colouring.
The rest is too outrageously ridiculous to be quoted.

Whatever Beyle's purely literary merits and his achievements in fiction may be, I quite agree with Berlioz, who remarks, a propos of this gentleman's Vie de Rossini, that he writes "les plus irritantes stupidites sur la musique, dont il croyait avoir le secret." To which cutting dictum may be added a no less cutting one of M.Lavoix fils, who, although calling Beyle an "ecrivain d'esprit," applies to him the appellation of "fanfaron d'ignorance en musique." I would go a step farther than either of these writers.

Beyle is an ignorant braggart, not only in music, but in art generally, and such esprit as his art criticisms exhibit would be even more common than it unfortunately now is, if he were oftener equalled in conceit and arrogance.

The pillorying of a humbug is so laudable an object that the reader will excuse the digression, which, moreover, may show what miserable instruments a poor biographer has sometimes to make use of.

Another informant, unknown to fame, but apparently more trustworthy, furnishes us with an account of Soliva in Warsaw.