Trust no promise, howe'er pleasant,
Not who may be, but who are;
Piccolomini at present,
Is the bright particular star.
JULLIEN'S DESPAIR
Jullien
Outside the opera houses, music in the period under review in this volume may be said to begin and end with Jullien, so far as Punch is concerned. Jullien is roughly handled in the very first number of Punch. In the autumn of 1857 satire has given place to affection and generous recognition. And Punch was right, for underneath all his superficial buffooneries Jullien was a great educator and reformer. The present writer vividly remembers an anecdote told him by the late Sir Charles Hallé in the 'eighties. After giving a description of Jullien's flamboyant attire—on one occasion he wore a shirt front embroidered with a picture of a nymph playing a flute under a palm tree—and his habit, after performing a solo on his golden piccolo, of flinging himself with a beau geste of exhaustion into a gorgeously upholstered armchair, Sir Charles Hallé went on to recall how Jullien had once said to him: "To succeed in music in England, one must be either a great genius like you, or a great charlatan like me." Now Jullien had been a failure as a student at the Paris Conservatoire—but so had Verdi at Milan. But there is no warrant whatever for Punch's statement that he was "a ci-devant waiter of a quarante-sous traiteur." Of the charlatan side of Jullien, the love of noise and, again to quote Carlyle, of the "explosion of all the upholsteries," Punch gives a graphic if severe picture in the verses which appear in his first number:—
MONSIEUR JULLIEN
"One!"—crash!