sive to those single strokes; willingly enduring stripes, while it hath no task to con. To music it cannot be passive. It will strive—mine at least will—'spite of its inaptitude, to thrid the maze; like an unskilled eye painfully poring upon hieroglyphics. I have sai through an Italian Opera, till, for sheer pain, and inexplicable anguish, I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded streets, to solace myself with sounds, which I was not obliged to follow, and get rid of the distracting torment of endless, fruitless, barren attention! 1 take refuge in the unpretending assemblage of honest common life sounds;—and the purgatory of the Enraged Musician becomes my paradise. I have sat at an Oratorio (that profanation of the purposes of the cheerful playhouse) watching the faces of the auditory in the pit (what a contrast to Hogarth's Laughing Audience!) immoveable, or affecting some faint emotion, till (as some have said, that our occupations in the next world wild be but a shadow of what delighted us in this) 1 have imagined myself in some cold Theatre in Hades, where some of the forms of the earthly one should be kept up, with none of the enjoyment ; or like that— —Party in a parlour, All silent, and all Damned! Above all, those insufferable concertos, and pieces of music, as they are called, do plague and embitter my apprehension.— Words are something; but to be exposed to an endless battery of mere sounds; to be long a dying, to lie stretched upon a rack of roses; to keep up languor by unintermitted effort; to pile honey upon sugar, and sugar upon honey, to an interminable tedious sweetness; to fill up sound with feeling, and strain ideas to keep pace with it; to gaze on empty frames, and be forced to make the pictures for yourself; to read a book, all stops, and be obliged to supply the verbal matter; to invent extempore tragedies, to answer to the vague gestures of an inexplicable rambling mime—these are faint shadows of what I have undergone from a series of the ablest-executed pieces of this empty instrumental music. I deny not, that in the opening of a concert, I have experienced something vastly lulling and agreeable:—afterwards followeth the languor, and the oppression. Like that disappointing book in Patmos ; or, like the comings on of melancholy, described by Burton, doth music make her first insinuating approaches:—" Most pleasant it is to such as are melancholy given, to walk alone in some solitary grove, betwixt wood and water, by some brook side, and to meditate upon some delightsome and pleasant subject, which shall affect him most amabilis insania and mentis gratissinms error. A most incomparable delight to build castles in the air, to go smiling to themselves, acting an infinite variety of parts, which they suppose, and strongly imagine, they act, or that they see done. So delightsome these toys at first, they could spend whole days and nights without sleep, even whole years in such contemplations, and fantastical meditations, which are like so many dreams, and will hardly be drawn from them—winding and unwinding themselves as so many clocks, and still pleasing their humours, until at the last the Scene Turns Upon A Sudden, and they being now habituated to such meditations and solitary places, can endure no company, can think of nothing but harsh and distasteful subjects. Fear, sorrow, suspicion, subrusticus pudor, discontent, cares, and weariness of life, surprise them on a sudden, and they can think of nothing else: continually suspecting, no sooner are their eyes open, but this infernal plague of melancholy seizeth on them, and terrifies their souls, representing some dismal object to their minds; which now, by no means, no labour, no persuasions, they can avoid, they cannot be rid of, they cannot resist." Something like this "SCENE-TURNING" I have experienced at the evening parties, at the house of my good Catholic friend Nov; who, by the aid of a capital organ, himself the most finished of players, converts his drawing-room into a chapel, his week-days into Sundays, and these latter into minor hea When my friend commences upon one of those solemn anthems, which peradventure struck upon my heedless ear, rambling in the side aisles of the dim abbey, some five and thirty years since, waking a new sense, and putting a soul of old religion into my young apprehension—(whether it he that, in which the psalmist, weary of the persecutions of bad men, wisheth to himself dove's wings—or that other, which, with a like measure of sobriety and pathos, jnquireth by what means the young man shall best cleanse his mind)—a holy calm pervadeth me. I am for the time, 66 But when this master of the spell, not content to have laid a soul prostrate, goes on, in his power, to inflict more bliss than lies in her capacity to receive—impatient to overcome her earthly" with his "heavenly,"—still pouring in, for protracted hours, fresh waves and fresh from the sea of sound, or from that inexhausted German ocean, above which, in triumphant progress, dolphin-seated, ride those Arions Haydn and Mozart, with their attendant Tritons Bach, Beethoven, and a countless tribe, whom to attempt to reckon up would but plunge me again in the deeps,—I stagger under the weight of harmony, reeling to and fro at my wit's end;--clouds, as of frankincense, oppress me —priests, altars, censers, dazzle before me—the genius of his religion hath me in her toils—a shadowy triple tiara invests the brow of my friend, late so naked, so ingenuous—he is Pope, —and by him sits, like as in the anomaly of dreams, a shePope too,—tri-coroneted like himself!— I am converted, and yet a Protestant;—at once malleus hereticorum, and myself grand heresiarch: or three heresies centre in my person: I am Marcion, Ebion, and Cerinthus—God and Magog—what not?—till the coming in of the friendly supper-tray dissipates the figment, and a draught of true Lutheran beer (in which chiefly my friend shows himself no bigot) at once reconciles me to the rationalities of a purer faith; and restores to me the genuine unterrifying aspects of my pleasant-countenanced host and hostess. ALL FOOLS DAY. The compliments of the season to my worthy masters, and a merry First of April to us all! Many happy returns of this day to you—and you—and you, Sir—nay, never frown, man, nor put a long face upon the matter. Do not we know one another? what need of ceremony among friends? we have all a touch of that same—you understand me a speck of the motley. Beshrew the man who on such a day as this, the general festival, should affect to stand aloof. I am none of those sneakers. I am free of the corpora tion, and care not who knows it. He that meets me in the forest to-day, shall meet with no wise-acre, I can tell him. Sultus sum. Translate me that, and take the meaning of it to yourself for your pains. What, man, we have four quarters of the globe on our side, at the least computation. Fill us a cup of that sparkling gooseberry—we will drink no wise, melancholy, politic port on this day and let us troll the catch of Amiens—due ad me—due ad me how goes it ? Here shall he see Gross fools as he. Now would I give a trifle to know historically and authentically, who was the greatest fool that ever lived. I would certainly give him in a bumper. Marry, of the present breed, I think I could without much difficulty name you the party. Remove your cap a little further, if you please; it hides my bauble. And now each man bestride his hobby, and dust away his bells to what tune he pleases. I will give you, for my part, The crazy old church clock, Good master Empedoclcs, you are welcome. It is long since you went a salamander-gathering down Etna. Worse than camphire-picking by some odds. 'Tis a mercy your worship did not singe your mustachios. Ha! Cleombrotus! and what salads in faith did you Tight upon at the bottom of the Mediterranean? You were founder, I take it, of the disinterested sect of the Calenturists. Gebir, my old free-mason, and prince of plasterers at Babel, bring in your trowel, most Ancient Grand! You have claim to a seat here at my right hand, as patron of the stammerers. You left your work, if I remember Herodotus correctly, at eight hundred million toises, or thereabout, above the level of the sea. Bless us, what a long bell you must have pulled, to call your top workmen to their nuncheon on the low grounds of Sennaar. Or did you send up your garlick and onions by a rocket? I am a rogue if 1 am not ashamed to show you our Monument on Fish-street Hill, after your altitudes. Yet we think it somewhat. What, the magnanimous Alexander in tears ?—cry, baby, put its finger in its eye, it shall have another globe, round as an orange, pretty moppet! Mister Adams--'odso, I honour your coat—pray do us the favour to read to us that sermon, which you lent to Mistress Slipsop—the twenty and second in your portmanteau there on Female Incontinence—the same—it will come in most irrelevantly and impertinently seasonable to the time of the day. Good Master Raymund Lully, you look wise. Pray correct that error. Duns, spare your definitions. I must fine you a bumper, or a paradox. We will have nothing said or done syllogisticalty this day. Remove those logical forms, waiter, that no gentleman break the tender shins of his apprehension stumbling across them. Master Stephen, you are late.—Ha! Cokes, is it you?—Aguecheek, my dear knight, let me pay my devoir to you.—Master Shallow, your worship's poor servant to command.—Master Silence, I will use few words with you.—Slender, it shall go hard if I edge not you in somewhere—You six Will engross all the poor wit of the company to-day.—I know it, I know it. Ha! honest R , my fine old Librarian of Ludgate, time out of mind, art thou here again? Bless thy doublet, it is not over-new, threadbare as thy stories :—what dost thou flitting about the world at this rate?—Thy customers are extinct, defunct, bed-rid, have ceased to read long ago.—Thou goest still among them, seeing if, peradventure, thou canst hawk a volume or two.—Good Granville S ,thy last patron, is flown. King Pandion, he is dead, All thy friends are lapt in lead.— Nevertheless, noble R, come in, and take your seat here, between Armado and Quisada: for in true courtesy, in gravity, in fantastic smiling to thyself, in courteous smiling upon others, in the goodly ornature of well-apparelled speech, and the commendation of wise sentences, thou art nothing inferior to those accomplished Dons of Spain. The spirit of chivalry forsake me for ever, when I forget thy singing the song of Macheath, which declares that he might be happy with either^ situated between those two ancient spinsters—when I forget the inimitable formal love which thou didst make, turning now to the one, and now to the other, with that Malvolian smile— as if Cervantes, not Gay, had written it for his hero; and as if thousands of periods must revolve, before the mirror of cour |