4 AND A SAFETY-VALVE. 83 off through her author of Elsie Venner bids us beware of the woman who cannot find free utterance for all her stormy inner life either in words or song. If she can sing, or play on any musical instrument, all her wickedness, he promises us, shall run throat or the tips of her fingers. (Miss Gwilt, in the last foot-note, is sadly an exception to the rule; a very strong exception indeed, but scarcely strong enough to prove the rule.) Many a tragedy, on Dr. Holmes's showing, finds its peaceful catastrophe in fierce roulades and strenuous bravuras; many a murder is executed in double-quick time upon the keys which stab the air with their daggerstrokes of sound. What would civilization, he asks, be without the piano? Are not Erard and Broadwood the two humanizers of our time? Therefore professes he to love to hear the all-pervading tumtum from houses in obscure streets and courts which to know is to be unknown, or even from the "open windows of the small, unlovely farm-house, tenanted by the hard-handed man of bovine flavours, and the flat-patterned woman of brokendown countenance.' * "For who knows that Almira, but for those keys, which throb away her wild impulses in harmless discords, would not have been floating, dead, in the brown stream which slides through the meadows by her father's door-or living, with that other current which runs beneath the gaslights over To the last, and at the last, music has been to many that thing of beauty which is a joy for ever. Sir Philip Sidney was solaced to the last, and at the last, by music,-listening particularly to a strange song which he had himself composed during his illness, and which he had entitled "La Cuisse rompue."* Very characteristic was the title Rousseau gave to that century, or thereabouts, of the romances he set to music,-Consolations des Misères de ma Vie. Earl Russell tells us of Thomas Moore that to the last day of his life he would sing, or ask his wife to sing to him, the favourite airs of his bygone days: dying, he "warbled;" and a "fond love of music never left him but with life." Fiction has its representative men in this line of things. German, Joseph Buschmann, in a well-known story, reckons on one kind ministrant to hold his darling musical-box to his ear, when his own strength shall fail him, and his senses be dulled-the box that the hand of Mozart had touched-to hold it "closer, closer always, when Joseph moans for the friendly music he has known from a baby, the friendly The old the slimy pavement, choking with wretched weeds that were once in spotless flower?"-Elsie Venner, chap. xxiii. * The fatal wound at Zutphen was from a musket-ball which struck him upon the thigh, three inches above the knee. AND AT THE LAST. 85 music that he can now so hardly, hardly hear." To the same author we owe a certain ode on music, one stanza of which is pertinent in this connection; impersonated music loquitur: "Still pleased, my solace I impart, Where brightest hopes are scatter'd dead; 'Tis mine—sweet gift !—to charm the heart, Though all its other joys have fled." A VI. A Musical Monarch. 2 Samuel vi. 5. T the bringing of the ark of God out of the house of Abinadab, which was at Gibeah, whence, after an unforeseen transfer to the house of Obed-edom, it was brought, three months later, into the city of David with gladness, "David, and all the house of Israel, played before the Lord on all manner of instruments made of fir-wood, even on harps, and on psalteries, and on timbrels, and on cornets, and on cymbals." The royal harper was in his element that day. That he played with his might we are as sure, as the express assurance of Scripture makes us that he "danced with his might," when the ark was conveyed to the tabernacle he had pitched for it. In the Characteristics of Lord Shaftesbury it is argued, and in his lordship's "characteristic " way, that if the first Jewish princes acted in real ac A MERRY" MONARCH. 87 cordance to the Mosaic institutions, "not only music, but even play and dance, were of holy appointment and divine right." The first monarch. of this nation, he goes on to remark, "though of a melancholy complexion," joined music with his spiritual exercises, and even used it as a remedy under that "dark enthusiasm, or evil spirit," which possessed him. ""Tis certain that the successor of this prince was a hearty espouser of the merry devotion, and by his example has shown it to have been fundamental in the religious constitution of his people."* Nemo saltat sobrius, says the pro * The famous entry or high dance performed by him, after só conspicuous a manner, in the procession of the sacred coffer, shows that he was not ashamed of expressing any ecstasy of joy or playsome humour, which was practised by the meanest of the priests or people on such an occasion." -Characteristics, vol. iii., Miscell. Reflections, chap. iii. Shaftesbury appends a foot-note in which he studiously views the royal dancer through Michal's eyes. Many are the moderns that do so; and not only the very most but the very worst is made of David's performance. Adam Smith observes that the man who skips and dances about with that intemperate and senseless joy which we cannot accompany him in, is the object of our contempt and indignation. That is said in the Theory of Moral Sentiment (Part I., sec. iii., chap. i.); and lack of sympathy is the motive cause (for this effect defective comes by cause) of the strictures on King David. Scoffers of every size are glad to have a hit at him; whether in the spirit of the French satirist, "Le roi David, danseur très vigoureux, |