ablest writers in every department of letters, it is not surprising, that, notwithstanding the great diffusion of musical knowledge in England, our musical literature at present should be almost wholly periodical. Some of our weekly journals, particularly the Spectator and Examiner, have excellent musical criticisms; and we have a Journal (The Harmonicon) entirely devoted to music.

The plan of the Harmonicon is admirably calculated to render it extensively useful and agreeable. It is published monthly, in a very elegant form; each number consisting of two separate parts, one of which is devoted to musical literature, and the other contains a selection of musical pieces. The literary part contains papers on interesting subjects, either original, or extracted from works not easily accessible reviews of musical publicationsample accounts of all the new operatic pieces brought out at the theatres, and of all remarkable musical performances-and (what forms a very interesting portion of each number) a foreign musical report, drawn partly from the foreign journals, and partly from private correspondence, and containing the musical news of every place of consequence in Europe. Those parts of the work which are from the Editor's pen are written with spirit and elegance; the reviews are manly and impartial, and the faults and beauties of composers are pointed out with a clearness and discrimination highly instructive to the student, while the young artist of genius is sure to meet with approbation and encouragement. Abuses and errors in the management of musical affairs are detected with acuteness, and exposed with firmness, and without respect of persons. And the consequence of all this is, that the Harmonicon has acquired much popularity and influence, and is contributing greatly to the improvement of taste, and the diffusion of musical knowledge.

It is not, we think, in the highest classes of society that this improvement is most conspicuous. Among them, the reign of fashion and frivolity continues too absolute to admit of substantial improvement in anythi ng-even in those arts of refinem'ent and elegance which seem pe

culiarly calculated for their gratification. An institution for the cultivation of music, indeed, has lately been established under great and splendid patronage; but the consequence of this splendid patronage is, that the showy and superficial seems to be substituted, in the system of tuition, for the substantial and useful. In place of spending years in severe study, and of being formed upon the greatest models of excellence, the young pupils of the Royal Academy of Music are taught to get up flashy public representations of Rossini's operas! An institution so conducted will not do much for the advancement of English music. "Yes!" says the Editor of the Harmonicon, in the number before us, "English music would prosper exceedingly in an Academy where all the vocal masters employed, and a considerable number of the teachers of various instruments, are foreigners; and where English music is as much despised, and as seldom heard, as in the mansions of the fashionable protectors of this institution !"

In consequence of the want of a good school of music in England, the acquirements of its professors are not, generally speaking, on a level with the present advanced state of musical taste and knowledge throughout the kingdom; and hence the demand for foreign compositions is universal. It is quite a mistake to talk of this as a rage, or fashion. The truth is, that the public are now accustomed to hear good music, and know what it is. There may be fashion in running to hear an Italian prima donna at the Opera-House; that is, many people may do this for fashion's sake, though even the votaries of fashion cannot listen to a Pasta or a Malibran without acquiring some taste for what is great and beautiful in music. But it is not fashion that has rendered it necessary to resort, almost exclusively, to Germany or Italy for the music which is employed to gratify the miscellaneous crowds who frequent the English theatres. Even they, since they have been accustomed to the music of Mozart, Rossini, and Weber, will no longer listen to the paltry productions, dignified with the name of operas, by our present race of composers. We need hardly say, that

we do not speak of Bishop at present. Bishop is a man of talent, and a good musician; but even he cannot stand beside the masters of Italy and Germany;- -as was shewn by his ill-advised attempt to contend with Weber by bringing out his Aladdin as a rival to the Oberon of that great man-an attempt which was judged, without a dissenting voice, to be a signal failure. In all other kinds of music the case is the same. The press groans with paltry ballads, and with equally paltry compositions for the piano-forte, consisting of airs with variations, and medleys, (or potpourris as they are called), made up by stringing together pieces from foreign operas; and these have a sale among boarding-school misses and others, to whose slender capacities they are especially adapted. But no English composer of the present day (and we say this without any hazard of contradiction) has written a single instrumental composition which has been found worthy of a place beside the works of the great foreign composers. We do not mean to say that Bishop is the only good musician

among the English composers. Several names may be mentioned as proofs of the contrary. But they do not affect the justice of the foregoing general remarks.

The advancement of learning and skill among practical musicians, therefore, not keeping pace with the general improvement in taste and knowledge, one of two consequences must follow. Either the public will resort to foreign markets for an article which cannot be well manufactured at home, or our English artists must strive successfully to improve the quality of their goods. We believe that the former of these consequences, after having taken place to a very great extent, will eventually lead to the latter. As soon as our young artists are thoroughly aware that profound study and unwearied application are necessary to their success, they will labour and study of course; and then England may acquire a pre-eminence in music equal to that which, by the same means, she has already acquired in the sister art of painting.

THAT a Frenchwoman in her eightythird year should consider the value set upon the opinions of old women as the surest, if not the only test of the moral, religious, and intellectual state of a country, is not, perhaps, altogether unaccountable. We must, nevertheless, acknowledge, that the first enunciation of such a theory, when we met with it the other day, in LES SOUPERS DE LA MARECHALE DE LUXEMBOURG, (a work written by Madame de Genlis, expressly for its elucidation,) so startled us, that we verily believe the mental showerbath sort of shock with which it acted upon our inward man, is the immediate and efficient cause of our sitting down at this present moment, to communicate to the world at large, and our readers in particular, our thoughts concerning the ci-devant fair, but now venerable, authoress, and some of her voluminous writings. Let us not, however, be suspected of a petulant and boyish contempt for old women. Boys we are not; and although, as the uncivilized natives of a foggy and half-barbarous island,

whose sons (the bêtes Anglaises of our more polished neighbours) are shrewdly suspected of caring more about public, or, what is tantamount, party interests, than les petits soins, even towards youthful beauties, who are, moreover, accustomed in our vernacular language to apply the words, "old woman," familiarly, and not in a sense especially laudatory, to individuals of both sexes, we cannot be expected to participate in the octogenarian authoress's views of the subject, or fully to comprehend the beauty of the text; still our chivalrous love, and our Gothic blood, have taught us not to limit the Spartan reverence for gray hairs, derived from our classical studies, solely to such gray hairs as grow upon the face, to the exclusion of those that surmount and surround the brow. We are, therefore, we flatter ourselves, prepared to treat all old ladies with the degree of respect to which they may be individually entitled; and towards Madame de Genlis herself, we feel most peculiarly kindly disposed, regarding her as the

mother, or rather grandmother, of the whole living family of female writers, and retaining a lively and grateful recollection of the amusement she frequently afforded us in our childhood and early youth. There is, however, a pitch of surpassing ab surdity beyond what the most indulgent partiality can tolerate-a climax of pedagoguish vanity which the pride of grown not stand, even from a French grannam; and accordingly, after bearing a good deal of annoyance of both kinds from Madame de Genlis, we are at last, despite all tender recollections, provoked to give vent to our long accumulating bile, by the SOUPERS DE LA MARECHALE DE LUXEMBOURG-a last year's book, though, as we have said, it fell into our hands only a day or two ago. Time was when three little pink-coated volumes, from such a pen, would not have solicited our notice in vain for as many days as these have months. Madame la Comtesse de Genlis began her literary career by writing for children, then, we believe, an almost new idea, at least in the style she introduced or adopted, combining instruction with entertainment. She has since been rivalled, and perhaps excelled, in this modest, but useful, department of literature; but assuredly, her THEATRE D'EDUCATION, her ANNALES DE LA VERTU, &c. &c. possessed very considerable merit; we ourselves well remember reading them with lively interest, and, we think, with profit. We beg leave, though, by the bye, to protest, in our character of stanch anti-innovators, against that desperately rational system of education which, now-adays, proscribes Jack the GiantKiller, Little Red Riding-Hood, and Co. from the juvenile library. Why should not the young imagination be sometimes idly delighted? We should as soon think of denying the Waverley Novels to readers of mature age and taste. But to return to Madame de Genlis. Her books for children were followed, or accompanied, by others for the benefit and direction of the papas and mammas of those children, and here begins our quarrel with this most didactic lady. Undoubtedly there is much in ADELE ET THEODORE that is good and judicious; but it is throughout defiled and vitiated by an artificial system

men and women can

of views, feelings, and morals, as well as of measures. The plots got up for the purpose of affording infant delinquents the advantage of individual experience, are such as every boy or girl of ordinary capacity must immediately detect; and we should boldly assert, that we had never known the principles of this work acted upon, even partially, without mischievous results, were we not checked by the authoress's own apparent success in educating the present Duke of Orleans. We say apparent success, because we have no means of ascertaining how far the princely pupil may be indebted for his moral excellence to the laborious schemes of his instructress, or how far Nature, like a kind mother, may have enabled him to acquire it, in spite of the governess's course of pious frauds and sentimental ethics.

Madame de Genlis next, we think, took to novel writing, and again, in this line, we freely acknowledge ourselves considerably indebted to her. Some of her earlier Romans, especially LE SIEGE DE LA ROCHELLE, and LES MERES RIVALES, highly interested and entertained us at the time of their publication; a time, however, when it is not unlikely that we might be somewhat less fastidiously critical than the subsequent lapse of years may have rendered

us.

But even in her Romans, the same factitious system of morality prevailed; and we are satisfied that we very much helped them to please us, by resolutely disregarding the lessons they were designed to enforce. Gradually the desire of instructing, so natural to a practical governess, encreased in strength, and the novels grew proportionably more didactic, more historical, more antiErotic, more anti-Encyclopedique, and duller; till, by little and little, they lost even the pseudo-Roman form, and were metamorphosed into Sou venirs, autobiography, and, finally, into such anomalous productions as, LE DICTIONNAIRE DES ETIQUETTES, LES DINERS DU BARON D'HOLBACH, LES SOUPERS DE LA MARECHALE DE LUXEMBOURG, and many others we apprehend, though we cannot tax our memory, nor, if we could, would we burden our pages, with their multifarious and multitudinous titles.

Upon the memoirs of the Authoress's own life, we seized with avidity the

throw of the Ancien Régime; judging the charter, the destruction of the Bastille, the abolition of Lettres de Cachet, and the improved condition of the peasantry, to be dearly purchased by-not the inconceivable horrors of the Reign of Terror, and the interminable wars of the empire, but the concomitant revolutionary innovations upon the structure and forms of la bonne Societé. For our own parts we are willing enough to admit, that existing French society is a good deal duller, and that existing Frenchmen are a good deal more ungallant, than English society and Englishmen have ever been within our recollection, though less so in all likelihood than these were some 50 or 100 years ago. But this is the utmost length we can go with the panegyrist of la bonne Societé. The very picture she exhibits to captivate our admiration, would alone suffice to prevent our joining in the painter's regrets for this empire of politeness, gaiety, religion, morality, and dowagers. Nay, we think, that even did we ourselves labour under the misfortune of being old women, these volumes, written by our ambitious sister to prove our legitimate supremacy, instead of inflating our anile vanity, would, by its representation of the result of such supremacy, have inspired us with an ultra humility that must have induced the immediate abdication of even that sceptre universally recognised as lawfully and naturally appertaining to the sisterhood, i. e. the nursery sceptre. And such, we are fully persuaded, will be the sentiments of every ancient dame in the British empire, who shall read the account we shall now give of the vaunted bonne Societé, under Madame de Genlis's admired and lamented graocracy.

The Maréchale de Luxembourg is held up to us as a perfect sample of the despotic elderly ladies of those their happy days; and assuredly no old woman under the sun ever did, can, or will desire, a sovereignty more absolute than she is represented as enjoying. Her hotel is frequented, her society is courted, by bishops, judges, and literati, as well as by great ladies of good and of bad repute; by Princes of the Blood, and fine gentlemen. All these visitors treat their aged hostess not merely with the courteous deference requi

red by good-breeding towards a hospitable entertainer of her age and sex, but with the submissive respect of school-boys and school-girls, towards an awe-inspiring pedagogue, or the subserviency of courtly dependents. They receive her word as law in matters of taste, morals, and literature; and young persons of both sexes are presented to her upon their first entrance into the world, or, what we call, coming out! that the station they are to occupy in it may be determined by her judgment respecting their look, dress, manner, and conduct. Yet this same Maréchale, as her admiring friend and eulogist allows in the introduction to the very work of which we are speaking, was not only destitute of instruction, Anglicé, booklearning, but had in her youth been one of, we believe, the most profligate of that most avowedly profligate of Courts, the Court of the Regent Duke of Orleans. And her having donné dans la devotion, or taken to piety, according to the then established French fashion for such ladies as did not profess philosophy, and had arrived at that melancholy period of female life, at which even the vainest usually despair of again inspiring la belle passion, was held, it seems, not only sufficient to reinstate her in her original place in society, but to invest her with this judicial authority over the morals and manners, the character and social rank of her acquaintance, which if to be exercised at all by old women, ought at least to be the guerdon of a cultivated mind, and a well-spent life. But as if this were not enough, amongst the heterogeneously mingled chatterers of both sexes, about religion and morality in these delectable coteries, we find Madame la Comtesse d'Egmont, the congenially worthy daughter of her notorious father, the arch-profligate Duc de Richelieu.

It is assuredly needless to declare, that we hold the dogmatically blasphemous, and seditious effusions of the French Encyclopédiste school of philosophy, in as thorough detestation as its indefatigable antagonist, Madame de Genlis herself, can do, and in rather more contempt probably; but really such twaddling polemics in defence of religion, virtue, and loyalty, such revolting exhibitions of impudence, hypocrisy, or, at best, of unimaginable self-delusion,