This scene, I say, is so nearly connected in my brain with the _Gagliarda_, that scarcely are its first notes sounded ere it presents itself to my eyes with a vividness which increases every day.

The couples advance, set, and recede, using free and licentious gestures which my imagination should be ashamed to recall.

Amongst so many foreigners, fancy pictures, I know not in the least why, the presence of a young man of an English type of face, whose features, however, always elude my mind's attempt to fix them.

I think that the opening subject of this _Gagliarda_ is a superior composition to the rest of it, for it is only during the first sixteen bars that the vision of bygone revelry presents itself to me.

With the last note of the sixteenth bar a veil is drawn suddenly across the scene, and with a sense almost of some catastrophe it vanishes.