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FLUTE PLAYERS,

Aristotle affirms that at the close of the Persian war there was scarcely a single free-born Athenian unacquainted with the flute-the use of this instrument being afterwards discontinued, and indeed proscribed in the education of freemen, from the notion, says a modern historian of ancient Athens, that it was not capable of music sufficiently elevated and intellectual.* But it wants not for enthusiastic admirers. Sainte-Beuve says, La flute + est un instrument touchant qui va au cœur plus

* An anecdote in Gellius, lib. xv., c. 17, refers the date of the disuse of this instrument to the age of Pericles, and during the boyhood of Alcibiades. "It was only succeeded by melodies more effeminate and luxurious," as we read in Athens: its Rise and Fall.

It was Alcibiades, according to Plutarch, who first gave occasion to the Athenians of the higher rank wholly to abandon the use of flutes—with this reason assigned: “the illiberal air which attended such performers, and the unmanly disfigurement of face and expression which this piping-work produced."

The Shepherd of the Noctes intimates pretty clearly his estimate of the instrument when he compares the mode of speaking with some people to it. "Their tone is gey an' musical, but wants vareeity, and though sweetish, is wersh, like the tone o' the floot. Then what puffin' an' spittin' o' wind and water! Mercy on us! ye canna hear the tune for the splutter, unless ye gang into anither room." But this refers to a callant learning to play.

+ One of Madame de Rémusat's romans is expressly entitled La Flute; for thereby hangs the tale. Here is a snatch, or broken echo of it: "Un jour, des airs languedociens bien

CLASSICAL AND ROMANTIC.

179

qu'aucun autre. Coleridge's Edmund, in a rather

namby-pamby style,

"Breathes in his flute sad airs, so wild and slow,

That his own cheek is wet with quiet tears.”

The venerated author of Memoirs of Port Royal

choisís arrachent des larmes à l'aieule et vont réveiller d'attendrissants souvenirs dans sa mémoire affaiblie." In Dryden's Song for St. Cecilia's Day, "the soft complaining flute, in dying notes, discovers the woes of hopeless lovers." Wordsworth's Ruth, when that oaten pipe of hers is mute, or thrown away, then

"with a flute

Her loneliness she cheers.:

This flute, made of a hemlock stalk,
At evening in his homeward walk

The Quantock woodman hears."

Nor is the flute of higher workmanship without commendatory notice in Wordsworth's miscellaneous sonnets,—one of which thus apostrophizes a clerical Cambridge friend, then visiting the lakes :

"O friend! thy flute has breathed a harmony
Softly resounded through this rocky glade;
Such strains of rapture as the Genius played
In his still haunts on Bagdad's summit high;
He who stood visible to Mirza's eye,"—

referring to the Vision of Mirza, in the Spectator.

Epaminondas is storied among the most eminent of flute players, who had some expression and execution to show forth. Nicholas Saunderson, the blind mathematician, was great on this instrument. It is rather piquant to read among the dismal entries of Wolfe Tone's diary, all at sea, and awaiting the projected invasion of Ireland by the Dutch, such interludes as this: "Admiral de Winter and I endeavour to

18c

FREDERICK THE GREAT

retained a lively remembrance of her first sight of William Priestley, as a long-haired youth, "playing

pass away the time playing the flute, which he does very well; we have some good duets." De Winter was soon to sit down on the evening of the hard-fought day of Camperdown, in the cabin of Admiral Duncan, and with him to play, not the flute, but whist, and by him to be beaten, and then and there to remark, with Dutch placidity, but with some graceful humour, that it was rather hard to be beaten twice in one day by the same opponent.

Frederick the Great is notable among flute-players. The first Earl of Malmesbury credits him with masterly performance on it. "So afraid is he of playing false, that when he is to try some new piece of music, he shuts himself up some hours beforehand in his closet to practise it, and even then when he begins it with the accompaniments he always trembles." He had a fine collection of flutes, and was very nice in the keeping of them, employing a man exclusively to look after them, "and preserve them dry or moist, as the season requires." All these instruments, it seems, were made by the same man, who received a hundred ducats for each flute, and who was scrupulously paid in good coin, when false money was distributed to everybody else. Mr. Carlyle affords us more than one glimpse of the Crown Prince retiring into some glade of the thickets, to hold a little " Flute-Hautbois Concert with his musical comrades, while the sows were getting baited." That" excellent Drill-Sergeant" Rentzel, is said to have awaked "the musical faculty in the little boy," by his own "beautiful playing" on the flute. "Fritz is a Querpfeifer und Poet,” not a soldier, would his indignant father growl, impatient of such effeminate ways: Querpfeife, that is (Mr. Carlyle explains) simply "German flute," Cross-pipe, or fife of any kind, for we English have thriftily made two useful

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AND OTHER EMINENT HANDS.

181

on the flute, with a beautiful little goat standing before him, with its fore-feet on his knees." Many

words out of Deutsch root; Cross-pipe being held across the
mouth, horizontally. Frederick William denied Fritz his very
flute, "most innocent 'Princess'" as he used to call it, from
the time he came to Custrin; but by degrees the Prince pri-
vately got his "Princess" back, and consorted much with her;
"wailed forth, in beautiful adagios," emotions for which he
then had no other utterance. Frederick was in his prime
when Voltaire declared that he played the flute like Telema-
chus;
the court on dit was that the King played it to per-
fection; which did not prevent Diderot from saying, "C'est
grand dommage que l'embouchure de cette belle flute soit
gatée par quelques grains de sable de Brandebourg."

Another kind of stoppage altogether obstructed the ventage of the flute presented as a love-gift to the celebrated Susanna, Countess of Eglintoune―for in her days, though she lived to walk as a peeress at the coronation of George III., the flute would seem to have been a lady's instrument, while as yet the pianoforte was not. On attempting to blow the presentation flute, blooming Susanna Kennedy (six feet high, by the way,) found that something obstructed the sound, and this turned out to be a copy of verses, expressing envy of the happy pipe thus conversant by gentle pressure with the lady's lips.

In the earlier chapters of Benvenuto Cellini's Life, the flute plays a prominent part; and great was the lad's detestation of the instrument his father constrained him to learn, and importuned him to practise unremittingly. To such a degree, writes the autobiographer, "did I hate that abominable flute, that I thought myself in a sort of paradise during my stay in Pisa, where I never once played upon that instrument." Yet he became a skilled and highly effective performer upon it; witness the rapture of Pope Clement, who declared that he

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LUTHER AND GOLDSMITH.

are the after-hours she records in her autobiography as "spent with William Priestley, and my little

had "never been delighted with more exquisite harmony," and was all curiosity to know how the services of “so great a master of the flute" had been secured for the delectation of his Holiness at dinner-time.

Luther played the flute as well as the guitar. He was once restored from one of his comatose fits by a monk gently playing on the flute an air that Brother Martin loved. He passed the whole night after his arrival at Worms at his window, "sometimes breathing the air of his hymn upon his flute." (His hostile biographer, Cochlæus, relates of him, in his progress to the Diet, that wherever he passed there was great crowding, and that “Luther, to draw all eyes upon him, played the harp like another Orpheus-a shaved and capuchined Orpheus.")

It was Oliver Goldsmith's way to blow off excitement through his flute with a kind of desperate "mechanical vehemence." During his tour on the Continent, he "picked up a kind of mendicant livelihood by the German flute,” like young Holberg, in fact, and like his own George Primrose in fiction. When an impecunious lodger in Green Arbour Court, he would compromise with the squalid squalling children of the colony for occasional cessation of their noise, by giving them a turn upon his flute, for which all the court assembled.

Bolton playing the flute to Miss Sindall's covert listening, in Mackenzie's Man of the World; Edward, taking a great deal of pains with it, in the Wahlverwandschaften of Goethe, only to make the Captain wish he would spare them "that eternal flute of his,” as he could make nothing of it; Dick Fairthorn in What will He Do with It? who, being the cleverest boy at his grammar school, unluckily took to the flute, and unfitted himself for the present century; these, and