ables. And yet I know not why one should speak of her so hardly, making her, as it were, the scapegoat of individuals-so meek and unrevengeful as she is too. I suppose the cause is cowardice; a collective hatred, too, has all the relish without the bitter after-taste of a personal animosity. But to continue. The world hates all musicians because they make a noise. She classes them with German bands, barrel-organs, paper-boys, old-clothesmen, the irrepressible sparrow, the matutinal quack of the parkhaunting duck and the town-bred chanticleer, who, by crowing throughout the night, forfeits his only claim to respect. Musicians violate the peace of the domestic hearth; their art is an obtrusive one. The poet who recites his verses and tears his hair is not, though his ravings equal those of the Cumæan Sibyl, as a rule, audible through that razor-like partition which, as in Swedenborg's other world, separates many a heaven and hell; but the abortive efforts of the tyro-musician cannot be restrained by the thickest and hardest of walls. Shut the window and door, the detestable fat notes drift down the chimney with perplexing perseverance. Do what you will, short of stopping your ears with wax, you cannot escape those unsirenish sounds. The only resource left to you is to fly to your piano-I don't ask if you have one-has a prize-fighter fists? did Fitzgerald possess a pair of pistols ?-to fly to your piano and revenge yourself on your unoffending neighbor on the other side. Thus the musician is not only the direct means of destroying other people's comfort, but is indirectly the author of multitudinous evils, and consequently an object of universal execration. Would not the composer of Home, Sweet Home," whoever he may be, turn in his grave if he knew that his innocent composition was daily torturing the most Christian souls into mingled thoughts of hatred and revenge? The Persians have doubtless lived to curse that king, who, in mistaken kindness, when he saw his subjects dancing without music, introduced 12,000 musicians and singers from abroad.

Are you

Yet no one will say roundly that he hates music. fond of music?" you ask your partner in the mazy waltz. Very," she replies, with a look of rapture; "but," she adds, "I don't care for Mozart, Handel, Beethoven," etc. One of England's wisest men is devoted to music, but dislikes all compositions in the minor:

Music is like the quack panacea for all ailments, to which, if it be successful, each attributes a particular virtue. Ah! it may not be of any use in cases of pericarditis or acute mania, but it has soften saved me from a fit of gout. Jim, you know, takes it for the hiccough. Music is the good fairy of our childhood, in whose basket is something good for every good boy. "Il Barbiere" for me; the

Eroica" symphony for you. It is not her fault that we

little boys will quarrel as to which gift is the best, and abuse the donor.

The many-sidedness of music makes her many eremies. That which pleases everybody delights nobody; and music, like everything else, has points that invite criticism. London walls are not built to withstand the battery of sound with which they are so often assailed. Hence the surly attitude of the householder, enhanced, no doubt, by British idiosyncrasies. An Englishman's house is his castle" is a favorite English proverb, a typical "John-Bullitude." The blessings of privacy are little understood in southern climates, where the necessity of a house as a shelter from the ele ments is not so imperative. A well-known artist, travelling in the south of Italy, had occasion to make lively protestations against an ancient sow for a bedfellow, and he subsequently heard the natives exclaiming among themselves, "Son matti ! son matti; tutti gli Inglesi son matti. We Englishmen resent the slightest circum-> stance which forces us to acknowledge ourselves as part of the community; and there is no more forcible reminder, except per-s haps a summons to serve on a grand jury, that such is our position, than the impertinent intrusion of the music of our neighbors. The faintest sound that penetrates the sacred paries we regard as violat ing our national privilege. We harden our hearts against it. We blunt our æsthetic sensibilities. We have a stereotyped formula to express our opinion of all music so heard. It is execrable. I once had lodgings next door to a famous tenor. I thought he sang atrociously; and it was only when I found out who he was that was obliged to recognize in him the artist who had so often entranced me at the opera. We are, in fact, like dogs-dogs in the manger-who howl at all music alike, good and bad. True it is we are not always so fortunate. True it is that the vicinity of the ambitious amateur is not to be coveted-nay, hardly to be borne.

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory.

But if those voices be not soft, and if those concords be discords,' the vibrations of which the memory is sensible are more pro nounced, more prolonged. We mark our disapprobation of the noise-loving qualities of Frenchmen by calling them “* our lively neighbors, but if we apply these words to "the people next door" it is with a ghastly facetiousness that masks a world of con centrated spite and hoarded venom appalling in these days of civ ilization. We are shocked at the immodesty that causes them to give publicity to their abortive efforts. We cannot understand their want of consideration for the feelings and comfort of others; we fail to imagine how they can derive enjoyment from such illassorted harmony (?); we are at a loss to compreliend why their

common-sense does not step in and put a check upon them. Our dilemma is excusable, and the horns of it are wide apart and grievously pointed.

My facetious friend T. H. says that every man, when he is under an arch, thinks he can sing; echo is the cause of many a selfadmiration. Now there are people who are born, who spend their existences, under an arch-a moral arch, I mean. To them, if their bent be musical, crescendos and diminuendos are fantastic adornments, time an unnecessary restriction, semitones needless refinements. They thump, they bang, they bellow, they roar, they shout, they scream, they squeal. But to them the meanest, the most erratic sound they make is better than heaven's sweetest music. It is trying to listen to the facile, well-connected amateur who dashes off a pot-pourri of the popular airs of the day. It is trying to detect the labored efforts of the humble, untiring, untalented student, who is ever striving, ever failing, to attain the correct rendering of a well-known classical composition. But, reader, have you ever lived next door to a family of orthodox ladies who every afternoon sing a selection of hymns ancient and modern, artfully so contrived that there is at least one note in each tune half a tone beyond the compass of the performer's voice? Why is it-I submit it to you-why is it that all musicians, good as well as bad, are prouder of their extreme notes than of any other portion of their voice? Why should the bass be ever struggling to perform feats natural to the tenor? why should the soprano be constantly endeavoring to commit larceny on the property of the contralto?

Is it because the result attained, though perchance unsatisfactory to others, is endeared to the performer by reason of the difficulty of the undertaking? Is this why these sorry sounds are prized as things of beauty, the more precious because they cannot last forever? Perhaps! But I think a deeper moral truth is here involved.

Gentle friend, have you ever been stirred into consciousness in the early morning, when the fires are unlit, when the housemaid is in bed, when the winter snow is on the ground, and the east wind is howling unreasonable retribution-by the sounds of the piano? Has the citadel of your slumber ever been thus rudely assaulted by the scaling ladders of perversely laborious young ladies? If not, you have not known regret. Young ladies, I weep tears-no crocodile tears-over your scales.

Thou, wicked old creature, with thy sallow notes, thy withered legs, thy cracked voice, of what hours of misery, of what ghastly profanities, of what needless chilblains hast thou not been the cause? Picture me, reader, as I lie in bed, thus bereft of two hours of blissful forgetfulness, "The people next door"-that is to say,

that portion of the people next door in whom I am so painfully interested, consist of five young ladies ranging from twelve years of age to twenty-" sweet and twenty," it is called-all immolating themselves on the altar of fashion, striving to be musical. They succeed each other, for to each is allotted a certain period of anteprandial martyrdom. As there are family characteristics in voice, in figure, in face, so are there in music. I have heard of a selfmade man, who purchased a nobleman's castle in the north, and employed a skilled painter to construct him a gallery of ancestors. in which his plebeian bottled-nose was palpably deduced, through a hundred nicely modulated gradations, from the delicate aquiline that came over with the Conqueror. A similar study is now presented to me, not in noses, but in ears; here are five young ladies all playing in succession the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata, with a stress of varying degrees of diabolicity on the last note of each triplet. There is some interest in the subject, but it is soon exhausted. This species of torture is enhanced when the torturer is scientific. I was calling the other day on some friends who have the impudence to imagine that living in a flat is the secret of true comfort. I found them in the wildest despair. I asked,

Why?" They only answered, "Listen." I listened. Overhead was a piano. They told me it was tenanted-I say tenanted, because I fancy the piano was of more importance to its owner than the room in which it stood-it was tenanted by an operatic composer. He was rehearsing a storm. "Tee-tee-tee-lee-tee-tee -tee-tee-tee-rom! pom!" There was no mistake about its being a storm, and what a storm it was! If I thought the composer was in any way attempting to be faithful to nature I would not visit even Paris again. I have since come to the conclusion that he must have studied meteorology, and in theory only. The hero was probably a meteorologist gone mad, that is, one who had overmeteorologized himself. An ideal or complete storm was visiting him in his dream; a storm with fixtures; a storm with all possible accessories; a storm with frightful, unheard of, auxiliary occur rences. Such a storm in fact as would have effectually prevented Eneas from eating his tables-such a storm as Walt Whitman would delight to catalogue :

I hear the so-ho of the sailors and the creaking of the chain that uplifts the anchor :

I hear the squelch of the billows on the gunwale:

I hear the cheery champing of hungry jaws at dinner:

I hear and rejoice;

For am not 1 part of them and they of me?

I hear in the morning at breakfast the champing of jaws diminish:

I hear the angry warnings of the rising gale:

I hear the mutterings of the animated ocean :

I hear and fear, for am not I part of them and they of me!

I appreciate the bravado of the captain:

I appreciate the sung-froid of the officers:

I appreciate the futile questionings of the anxious passengers.

For am not I part of them and they of me?

I fear the whirlwind, the whirlpool, the tornado, the simoom, and the scirocco. I fear likewise the thunder and the lightning.

I fear the plagues of Egypt.

For am not I part of them and they of me?

I listen to the creaking of the straining cordage:

I listen to the orders of the captain amid the overbearing din of the tempest: I listen to the clatter of the axes and the crashing fall of the mainmast:

I listen to the thud of the keel on the shingle:

I listen to the unbounded license of the crew:

I listen to the screaming of the affrighted passengers:

I listen to the awful ultimate silence.

For is that not part of me and I of that?

So did we listen perforce, and we wished it had been. He pauses breathless. We congratulate ourselves that Providence has placed limits to human exertion even in moments of the wildest inspiration, Silence at last! But no! tee-tee-tee-tee-tee-tee-tee-tee-tee -rom! pom! Another storm is brewing. I bid my friends farewell and return home-I confess it-to speculate on the enormous advantages that would accrue to mankind if operas could dispense with composition. But was I right thus to give way to irritability? Let me calculate the comparative importance of my discomfort and my musical friend's unpleasant undertaking! Am I penning an epic that will eclipse "Paradise Lost?" Am I writing a history that will outdo Macaulay? Or rather, do I think I am? Then let me use all my endeavors to suppress my tuneful neighbor. 1 fear, however, that it is only when I am idle that I find time to grumble, or that there is aught to grumble at.

Most of us run in a groove and make ourselves very unpleasant if that groove is not well oiled for us; and thus it comes that the minor calamities of life coustitute its real unhappiness, just as the little unexpected pleasures furnish the chief contribution to its happiness, After all, we are little better than children to whom the divine justice of nature has decreed that so many sugar-plums entail so much castor-oil, Therefore let us not repine if the permission to sleep in a warm soft bed is qualified with a seasoning of adjacent discords.

We tolerate infancy; let us be charitable to infant musicians. We gloze over that period of our children's lives when their existence is a hideous nightmare-a constant alternation of famine and surfeit; when the wail of inanition follows hard upon the stertorous breathing of repletion, for the sake partly of the sudden random gleam of inner light that breaks from thein, and reminds us of the great anti-Darwin. But, to make prose of one of England's