is liberality. When a well-known wealthy amateur of London, desirous of carrying out a similar plan, consulted Mr. Higginson about some of the details of his expenses, he was told not to worry too much about the bills. “You don’t worry about your wine bills nor about your cigar bills, nor about your wife’s dressmaking bills,”—Mr. Higginson was addressing a millionaire,—“and you must treat your orchestra’s bills in the same way.”
What a permanent orchestra may involve in expenditure above what its public pays to hear it may be judged from the reports of similar organizations that do reveal the facts. In one recent year the Philadelphia Orchestra acknowledged a deficit of nearly $80,000. The comparatively modest Pittsburg Orchestra, a year ago, called upon its guarantors to make up a loss of about $40,000. In the first ten years of its existence the Chicago Orchestra sank about $300,000. In the beginning Mr. Higginson was heavily burdened; and especially a source of great expense was the visits to distant cities which the orchestra began to make in 1887. But since it first presented itself in New York in that year it has built up a very large and substantial body of admirers here—as large as the hall can accommodate; and in the other cities included in its five monthly pilgrimages—Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Baltimore—it has met with similar success. It gives many concerts in all the large cities of New England that can be reached from Boston overnight, and it could play still more frequently to the advantage of its treasury did the conductor feel equal to standing the strain of more traveling.
It is in ways such as this that Mr. Higginson’s achievements with the Boston Symphony Orchestra have spread their benefits far outside of Boston. He has raised the standard of orchestral playing in this country immeasurably, and has created a taste and a demand for what was unknown before he began his work. He has set Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, and Cincinnati to an emulation of Boston; and has made many good people in New York very uneasy in their desire to do so. He has caused American music to be spoken of with respect and admiration by every European musician. And all the lovers of music in his own country ought to rise up and call him blessed.
New Discovery at Pompeii
A Fresco Representing the Origin of Rome
By Proffessor Ettore Païs
[The new methods of illustration make it possible for us to present herewith, for the first time, a reproduction in color of the latest important pictorial discovery at Pompeii. The picture here reproduced in small was brought to light under the then director of the National Museum of Naples, and of the excavations at Pompeii, Professor Ettore Païs, who has prepared for the readers of The Century a popular account of this interesting painting. Signor Païs is now Professor of Ancient History and Classical Antiquities in the National University of Naples, and a member of the Academy of Sciences there. He is lecturing during the present year in America, before various universities and other audiences.—Editor]
The fresco which is here presented to the readers of The Century has never before been published in color. It was discovered recently at Pompeii, in that part of the buried city which faces Vesuvius. It was, under my orders, placed in the collection of Pompeian wall-paintings at the National Museum of Naples, which I had the honor of reorganizing. The fresco belongs to that inexhaustible series
