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COMPOSERS AND CLAMOUR.

presence of such a crew be to a sensitive composer of crotchets and quavers? How does M. Stephen Heller feel, when their clamour overtakes him in the midst of a Rêverie, surpassingly delicate and refined? How relishes M. Gounod their accompaniment to an opening theme of his? or Sir Sterndale Bennett their interposition of discord to his placid harmonies? or Mr. Macfarren their boisterous obbligato to one of his ballad strains? If Longfellow's artist pines for the revival of an ancient law which forbade those who followed any noisy handicraft from living near literary men, still more earnest and interested is his plea that musical composers, poor and hard beset, and who, moreover, are forced to coin their inspiration into gold, to spin out the thread of life withal, should be allowed to apply this law in their favour, and banish out of the neighbourhood all ballad singers and bagpipers. What, he asks, would a painter say, while transferring to his canvas a form of ideal beauty, if you should hold up before him all manner of wild faces and ugly masks? But then he might shut his eyes, and in this way, at least, quietly follow out the images of fancy. Whereas in the case of brass bands, and the like, "cotton in one's ears is of no use, one still hears the dreadful massacre. And then the idea, the bare idea, 'Now they are going to sing-now the horn strikes up,'

* Many a weakly goodnatured man pays very much in the spirit and with the sense of the clown in Othello, when the musicians have duly exercised their wind instruments in front of the castle :

"Clo. Masters, here's money for you; and the General so likes your music, that he desires you, of all loves, to make no more noise with it.

"I Mus. Well, sir, we will not.

Clo. If you have any music that may not be heard, to't again: but, as they say, to hear music the General does not greatly care.

1 Mus. We have none such, sir.

Clo. Then put up your pipes in your bag, for I'll away. Go; vanish into air; away."

Othello, Act iii., Sc. 1.

This sort of Ite, missa est, is of a sort with that of the Princess Augusta addressed to Madame d'Arblay's little boy, when the royal family were making much of him, and plying him with toys. "Princess Elizabeth now began playing upon an organ she had brought him, which he flew to seize. 'Ay, do! that's right, my dear!' cried Princess Augusta, stopping her ears at some discordant sounds:‘take it to mon ami, to frighten the cats out of his garden."" A very legitimate use of the instrument in general,—if only one could frighten the cats without torturing humanity at the same time.

All our sympathies are with Matthew Bramble, “starting and staring, with marks of indignation and disquiet," at the sudden burst of sound from one street band-and with his peremptory message to another, to silence those dreadful blasts." And even with Sheridan's Don Jerome, complaining from his open window,

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What vagabonds are these I hear,
Fiddling, fluting, rhyming, ranting,

Piping, scraping, whining, canting?"

1

70

BRASS-BAND MAL-PRACTICE.

and does well to be, sore on that sore point, in
his Music-Grinders, where, after describing the
approach of the troublers from afar, getting nearer
and nearer, till you hear a sound that seems to
wear the semblance of a tune, as if a broken fife
should strive to drown a cracked bassoon, and
nearer, nearer still the tide of "music seems to
come, with something like a human voice, and
something like a drum, the while you sit in agony,
until you ear is numb, listening in your own despite
to performers whose mission it seemingly is "to
.crack the voice of Melody, and break the legs of
Time;"-after thus picturing the performers and
the performances he continues-

"But hark! the air again is still, the music all is ground,
And silence, like a poultice, comes to heal the blows of
sound;

It cannot be, it is,—it is,—a hat is going round!

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And with Anstey's fractious old gouty peer, protesting against the fiddlers come hither to make all this rout," with their vile "squeaking catgut that's worse than the gout." And with Hook anathematizing a brass band "with those terrible wind instruments, which roar away in defiance of all rule, except that which Hoyle addresses to young whist players when in doubt-trump it." And with Ben Jonson's Morose, excruciated by conspirators against his peace, who hire musicians to strike up all together, so that he feels himself their anvil to work on; they grate him asunder.

"Mor. They have rent my roof, walls, and all my windows asunder, with their brazen throats."

BRONZE FOR BRASS.

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"No! Pay the dentist when he leaves a fracture in your jaw, And pay the owner of the bear that stunned you with his

paw,

And buy the lobster that has had your knuckles in his claw:

“But if you are a portly man, put on your fiercest frown,

And talk about a constable to turn them out of town ; Then close your sentence with a slam, and shut the window down.

"And if you are a slender man, not big enough for that, Or if you cannot make a speech, because you are a flat, Go very quietly and drop a button in the hat."

But, portly or slender, on no account pay them to go away. That is paying them to come again. And yet there is sweet simplicity enough in the world to go on doing this. Of course the brazenfaced brass-mouthed gentry like, of all things, to be stopped short in their playing, and paid for being so dismissed; for that is getting the pay without the windy-windy toil and trouble. And of course they come again, under such auspices. There is a shrewd organ-grinder who turns up every Saturday morning at half-past eight in front of a certain large house in a certain favourite suburb; for it is the hour of family prayers, and as they can't stand his noise, they pay him to go away after he has ground a few bars. Pay him handsomely too, and keep on doing it. not be the first to get tired of this.

He will

V.

Saul's Malady and David's Minstrelsy.*

DEA

I Samuel xvi. 23; xix. 9, 10.

EAN MILMAN, in that chapter of his History of the Jews which treats of David playing before Saul, makes a clear statement of what the cardinal difficulty in the Scriptural narrative is :-If David, according to the order of events in the Book of Samuel, had already attended the sick couch of Saul as minstrel, and had been rewarded for his services with the office of armourbearer, and so became intimately attached to the person of the king-how could he be the unknown Shepherd-boy who appeared to combat with Goliath in the field of Ephez-dammim? On the other hand, if already distinguished as the conqueror

*For additional illustrations of this subject, see the section headed "Medicamental Music," in the First Series of my Secular Annotations on Scripture Texts, pp. 5560.