Famous Musical Composers. By Lydia T. Morris. (T. Fisher Unwin,)—This
volume of short biographies of musical composers, edited by Miss Morris, is decidedly worthy of notice, and will be found interesting and useful by students of music. Many of the lives are those of men little known to the public, especially to the young schoolgirl and schoolboy portion. One thing we regret, —namely, that the lives of the greatest composers, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Mozart, dic., are so much longer and more detailed than those of the less well-known, for instance, Dvora, Hille, &c. Almost every one who plays a musical instru- ment knows the outline of the lives of Mozart, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn ; but many of us are ignorant of those of Moscheles, Brahma, Rubinstein, &c., and as these are not in such common cir- culation as separate volumes, it seems a pity, perhaps, that so little should be made of them in a collection of short lives. We should like to suggest that, if this book is intended, as we understand it is, for a text-book for class-rooms, it would probably be more universally read and referred to, if it could be brought out in a cheaper form. It is so well " got-up," that we fear it will be kept for the drawing-room rather than the schoolroom ; but its value, in either a cheap er expensive form, is as a book of easy reference.
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