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RUSTIC CHOIRS.

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thought of time and place in the luxury of a closing cadence that he holds on to the last semibreve upon his private responsibility; but "how much more of the spirit of the old Psalmist in the music of these imperfectly trained voices than in the academic niceties of the paid performers who take our musical worship out of our hands." True in spirit, and to the letter, for all the year roundthe Christian Year-is what Keble says or sings in his lyric for Palm Sunday :

"Childlike though the voices be,
And untunable the parts,
Thou wilt own the minstrelsy,

If it flows from childlike hearts."

The musical mal-practice of rustic choirs has too often, however, only too thoroughly deserved the satire that first and last has been lavished on it. Some of our best writers of fiction have made a subject of this grievance in fact. Mr. Hughes, in his Tom Brown at Oxford, dilates on the doings of the choir at the Englebourn parish church; how the bass viol proceeded thither to do the usual rehearsals, and gossip with the sexton; and how at the singing of the verse which ends with the line, "With dragons stout and strong," (in the ninety-first psalm,) which the gallery sang with exceptional and rather exceptionable vigour,— the trebles took up the line, and then the whole

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UNTUNABLE, INTRACTABLE.

strength of the gallery chorused again, "With dra-gons stout and strong," and the bass viol seemed to prolong the notes and to gloat over them as he droned them out, looking triumphantly at the distant curate, whose mild protests it was pleasant thus to defy. Mr. Charles Reade somewhere introduces to us a lad with a small rustic genius for music, which he illustrates by playing the clarionet in church, to the great regret of the clergy. So minute and observant a recorder of English midlandshire georgics and bucolics as George Eliot, naturally abounds in notices of a like sort. In Felix Holt there is a persistent plaint, by one in authority, about the obstinate demeanour of the singers, who decline to change the tunes in accordance with a change in the selection of the hymns, and stretch short metre into long out of pure wilfulness and defiance, irreverently adapting the most sacred monosyllables to a multitude of wandering quavers.* "There's no other music equal

"I cannot but think it a snare when a professing Christian has a bass voice like brother Kemp's," says Mr. Nuttwood, deacon and grocer. "It makes him desire to be heard of men; but the weaker song of the humble may have more power in the ear of God." An outspoken friend retorts upon the speaker the query, does he think it any better vanity to flatter himself that God likes to hear him, though men don't? Felix Holt is, indeed, rather flippantly severe upon the sleek 'radesman, whom he ironically bids "follow the light of the

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BUCOLIC BASSOON.

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to the Christmas music-'Hark the erol angils sing,"" poor Dolly assures Silas Marner; "And you may judge what it is at church, Master Marner, with the bassoon and the voices, as you can't help thinking you've got to a better place already." In the same book we come across a large jocose-looking man, an excellent wheelwright in his week-day capacity, but on Sunday leader of the choir, who puts down a recalcitrant with a jest, winking the while at the "bassoon" and the "key-bugle," in the confidence that he is expressing the sense of the musical profession in Raveloe. And in one of the Scenes of Clerical Life we have a rather elaborate account of the process and procedure of the singing at Shepperton Church; how, as the moment of psalmody approached, a slate appeared in front of the gallery, advertising in bold characters the psalm about to be sung, lest the sonorous announcement of the clerk should leave the bucolic mind in doubt on that head; how this was followed by the migration of the clerk to the gallery, where, in company

old-fashioned Presbyterians that I've heard sing at Glasgow. The preacher gives out the tenth psalm, and then everybody sings a different tune, as it happens to turn up in their throats. It's a domineering thing to set a tune, and expect everybody else to follow it. It's a denial of private judgment."-Felix Holt, chap. xiii.

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ANTHEMS AND AMATEURS.

with a bassoon, two key-bugles, a carpenter understood to have an amazing power of singing "counter," and two lesser musical stars, he formed the complement of a choir regarded in Shepperton as one of distinguished attraction, occasionally known to draw hearers from the next parish. "But the greatest triumphs of the Shepperton choir were reserved for the Sundays when the slate announced an ANTHEM, with a dignified abstinence from particularisation, both words and music lying far beyond the reach of the most ambitious amateurs in the congregation," an anthem in which the key-bugles are described as always running away at a great pace, while the bassoon every now and then boomed a flying shot after them.

II.

Jubal's Invention.

Genesis iv. 21.

USIC must have got some way beyond

MUS

the most primitive stage of all,* when Jubal, the son of Lamech and Adah, the brother of Jabal (whose children are all such as dwell in

* Mr. Herbert Spencer accepts the argument of Dr. Burney, as indeed implied by the customs of still extant barbarous races, that the first musical instruments were, without doubt, percussive-sticks, calabashes, and tomtoms; and were used simply to mark the time of the dance; and in this constant repetition of the same sound, we see music in its most homogeneous form. In his treatise on the origin and function of music, the same philosophic writer takes note of the fact that the dance chants of savage tribes are very monotonous, and in virtue of their monotony are much more nearly allied to ordinary speech than are the songs of civilized races (from which, and cognate facts, he infers the original divergence of vocal music from emotional speech in a gradual, unobtrusive manner). Delightful to savage ears would be what is so horrid to Shakspeare's Richard :—

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