Give me back, give me back, the wild freshness of morning,

Her clouds and her tears are worth evening's best light.

Napoleon had no ear for music, his voice was unmusical, at least so Miss Balcombe says, who frequently heard him sing at St. Helena. Yet he liked songs, and simple melodies, and would often hum his favorite air "Vive Henri Quatre." Paisiello's music pleased him, "because," he said, "it did not interrupt his thoughts." Frederick the Great played on the flute, possibly more to his own than to his subjects' content. But he really was fond of music, and would have a concert whenever he could after his dinner. Quantz would get up an entertainment for him where the great king would help to perform pieces of his own composition as well as music, which may have given more delight to his audience than his own. Fasch says that of all the performers he had heard, his friend Bach, Benda, and the king, produced the most pathetic adagio.

We will set Frederick the Great against Napoleon, and if that is not considered a sufficient reply to those who will have it that rulers of men are despisers of music, we bring Oliver Cromwell as an instance to the contrary.

Oliver Cromwell and Frederick the Great were certainly rulers of men, and may fairly be cited on one side against Napoleon on the other. "Oliver Cromwell," says Wood, "loved a good voice and instrumental music," and, says Mr. Leslie Stephen, Wood goes on to tell the story of " a senior student of Christ Church, expelled by the visitors, whom Cromwell restored to his studentship in return for the pleasure which his singing had given him."

Bismarck, certainly one of the rulers of men, is said to delight in Beethoven, and generally with the highest order of music. He would listen with zest to Joachim on the violin. In a letter to his wife he speaks of himself as "well but suffering from homesickness, yearning for forest, ocean, desert, you, and the children, all mixed up with sunset and Beethoven."

The Duke of Wellington, as is well known, was devoted to music. His father, the Earl of Mornington, was a composer, whose reputation one would imagine was known to the son, but the following anec dote, if true, shows how true it is that no man is a prophet in his own country:

re

of Mornington's name appears to the glee "Here in cool grot." The duke, on seeing the name, said to Sir Henry, "Ah. my worthy father! Could he compose?" "Yes," plied the conductor; "he has composed music which any professor would be proud to claim." "Ah, indeed! rejoined the duke, "I am glad to hear it.”

George III. was exceedingly fond of music. To him as to Saul it came as a comfort in trouble; the one king it soothed in time of madness, and the other got a short suspense by it from his troubles with the priesthood. It is curious that the last piece selected by George III. for the sacred concerts, prior to his final attack of insanity, comprised Handel's famous passages descriptive of madness and blindness. So fond of music was King George III. that he would always urge attendance on the Concerts of Ancient Music upon his courtiers, and the king was particularly pressing on one occasion with Lord North, who cared very little about music, reminding him that his brother always attended the concerts. 66 'Ah," replied Lord North, "but your Majesty forgets that my brother is deaf.”

When a meeting was held to decide upon a monument to Dean Stanley, Lord Granville observed:

I believe the dean had no appreciation whatever of music, and it is perhaps the one art which with most difficulty fits in with the individual life of man. The dean told me he was very little influenced by music, but he had much greater pleasure, from historical association, in listening to a hymn of Luther or of Charles Wesley, than to the most exquisite harmony of Mozart or Beethoven.

While this was the case with the Dean of Westminster, Stanley's great friend Thirlwall was very fond of music, especially of the songs of Wales and Italy.

Queen Victoria, it is well known, is not only fond of music, but is an excellent pianist with a wonderfully correct ear. The Baroness Bloomfield in her "Reminiscences," relates how on one occasion the queen desired her to sing, and she, "in fear and trembling sang one of Grisi's famous airs, but omitted a shake at the end. The queen's quick ear immediately detected the omission, and smiling, her Majesty said, 'Does not your sister shake, Lady Normanby?' to which Lady Normanby promptly replied, 'Oh! yes, ma'am, she is shaking all over.'

999

Lady Pollock tells us that

music and its exponents in great contempt. To the long list of those who despised an art which nature denied them the

power to appreciate, must be added Dumas, who gave mortal offence to Wagner by telling him that he considered music the most expensive of noises. We have before spoken of Kant, but his objections were to the die-away music, for he admitted his liking for a military band. Rogers, whatever his dislike might be to music which was merely difficult, keenly appreciated really good music. No one more thoroughly enjoyed the delicious singing of Tom Moore, or a seat at the Concerts of Ancient Music, though Mr. Hayward tells us he preferred simple melodies to complicated harmonies. Sydney Smith said he would rather hear Moore sing than any person he had ever heard, male or female.

Though Kant thought music which was not military calculated to effeminate the mind, and lower the moral fibre, he is probably in a minority in this opinion, and we find Bourdaloue playing on the violin before he ascended the pulpit, that he might work himself up to the requisite

enthusiasm.

Gray, says Mr. Twining, had "an enthusiastic love of expressive and passionate music. Pergolesi was his darling." Yet he did not appreciate Handel, though holding in admiration the chorus in "Jephtha," "No more to Ammon's God and King." One would expect that an ear so tuned to rhythm should be drawn towards music. Not that all poets are lovers of music. Moore in his diary-which by the way should be re-edited and condensed, omitting much repetition, and many too trivial entries, for it contains a perfect mine of anecdote - Moore observes of Wordsworth that the poet in speaking of music, and the difference there is between the poetical and the musical ear, said he (Wordsworth) was totally devoid of the latter, and for a long time could not distinguish one tune from another.

In a graceful letter to Abraham Hayward, written from Geneva à propos of Lady Emily Peel, sister of Lord Gifford, the gifted and beautiful Mrs. Norton

writes:

This place is delicious, and Lady Emily charming, reminding me much, in a certain earnestness and simplicity, of Gifford, her brother, and full of information and ability of

ent to.

Though having no reference to the subject, yet I cannot resist another passage from this letter, in which Mrs. Norton gives us the following_delicious description of herself by a French gentleman. He wished to be highly complimentary to her mental and other characteristics, and declares his worship of her because she is "so spirituous and abandoned."

Some men are born lovers of music, This I take to be and some dislike it. true of the rulers of men, as of all other men - some like, some dislike. We have a certain pity for those to whom nature has denied one of her choicest gifts. My old schoolmaster, George Poticary of Blackheath, the master of the school where Disraeli was educated, sometimes used to come into the schoolroom singing Anacreon's "é éyew 'Arpeidas," and most things offered him occasion for musical expression.

Father Prout, the author of "The Reliques," a volume to have by your side at breakfast-time, was no lover of music, though his ear must have been rhythmically attuned, as instance his beautiful song on "The Shandon Bells," on which were inscribed:

Sabbato pango, Funera plango, Solemnia clango.

Music as we have it, is, I suppose, quite a modern art. Jews and Greeks used Romans had very little in their soul, and it as an accompaniment to song, and the kept their noise for their triumphs. They discovered little taste for it, unless Nero's fiddling show a bias that way.

Twining, in that choice book, "A Country, Clergyman of the Eighteenth Century," says: "As for the specimens of Greek music, they are enough, I should think, to damp the keenest curiosity that ever forced its way through a page of Aristoxenus." "

The Church took music in hand, but its early music, if we may judge by the Gregorians, was of no high type. Writing to Zelter, Mendelssohn observes in opposition to Zelter's views apparently of these Gregorians, "I can't help it; it shocks me

to hear the most solemn and beautiful

words chanted along with such unmeaning, hurdy-gurdy sounds." Something must be said for them, for the great Gregory found the Church music "too free and

secular in character." Even in our own day we find a tendency to secularize the music employed for "Hymns Ancient and Modern," and I have heard one hymn sung to an air perilously near to " Slap, bang, here we are again!" Southey has well described what Church music should be:

There must be no voluntary maggots, no military tattoos, no light and galliardizing notes; nothing that may make the fancy trifling, or raise an improper thought, which would be to profane the service, and to bring the playhouse into the church. Religious harmony must be moving, but noble withal grave, solemn, and seraphic, fit for a martyr to play, and an angel to hear. It should be contrived so as to warm the best blood within us, and to take hold of the finest part of the affections; to transport us with the beauty of holiness, to raise us above the satisfactions of life, and make us ambitious of the glories of

heaven.

So much for church music, and now back to our subject and old Pepys.

Pepys belonged to those who loved melody, but who could not follow concerted music with any pleasure. "Never was so little pleased with a concert of music in my life," he writes, when commanded by royalty to Whitehall to hear an entertainment provided by Monsieur Grebus.

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On another occasion he writes: With my wife to the King's House to see the " Virgin Martyr." That which

pleased me beyond anything in the whole world was the wind-musick when the angel comes down, which is so sweet that it ravished me. .. I remained all night transported, so that I could not believe that ever any musick hath that real command over the soul of a man as this did upon me, and makes me resolve to practise wind musick, and to make my wife do the like.

Pope had no knowledge of music, though he had a musical ear and a musical voice; so much so that Southerne called him the "little nightingale."

Addison preferred the music of the thrush to any other, and invited the Earl of Warwick to a concert of music "which I have found out in a neighboring wood." It begins precisely at six in the evening, and consists of a blackbird, a thrush, a robin redbreast, and a bull-finch. There is a lark that, by way of overture, sings and mounts till she is almost out of hearing, and afterwards falling down leisurely, drops to the ground as soon as she has ended her song. The whole is concluded by a nightingale that has a much better voice than Mrs. Tofts, and something of the Italian manner in her divisions. If your lordship will honor me with your com

pany, I will promise to entertain you with much better music and more agreeable scenes than ever you met with at the opera.

Many men there are who enjoy a beautiful melody, and may yet be wholly unable to enter into the dreams of Schumann or into the fancies of Chopin; those who find real delight in the abounding melody of Rossini without being able to follow the mind music of Beethoven, who taste, as fully as the greatest lover of music, those two beautiful songs, "Should he upbraid or "Bid me discourse," and yet be lost and fatigued by what appears to them the entanglements and mazes of Sebastian Bach. The growth of harmony has, oddly enough, been a cause of the decay of melody. The childhood of music, with its sweet simplicity, its

notes with many a winding bout Of linked sweetness long drawn out, curls and twiddles" of Purcell, appeals at even with what Twining calls the "old him; but thoroughly to enjoy the harmoonce to every one who has any music in nies of modern music one requires an education, and some of them one ap proaches with the same sort of distaste one has for olives till we learn to like them. Twining observes that "the steps by which ancient music got forward into modern, and melody slid by degrees into harmony, I take to be one of the darkest processes of the dark ages." I suppose Beethoven's "Fidelio" might be an instance where harmony overrides melody, and that grandest of operas, "Don Giovanni," an instance where melody floats over harmony. This may be fanciful, but is as it strikes an ignoramus, and I think Edward Fitzgerald says as much of "Fidelio." When writing to Sir Frederick melody in it as you do." Pollock, he says, "I do not find so much

I will wind up these remarks - crotchets may be-by asking what art is so plastic as music, so capable of responding to every emotion of the soul? How itlent made "the floods lift up their voice," and intensity to David when with his harp he sang, "The voice of the Lord breaketh the cedar-trees; yea, the Lord breaketh the cedars of Libanus." How it calmed the vexed spirit of Saul in his life-long contest with sacerdotalism; and how "the hidden soul of harmony "inspired blind Milton, and flowed into his "L'Allegro and "Il Penseroso."

Surely this all points to a valuable quality missing in a great leader of men if he be incapable of receiving pleasure from