| Vol. 12. No. 330.] | SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1828 | [PRICE 2d. |
We cannot help it.—Massinger's Roman Actor.
Astronomy, music, and architecture, are the floating topics ofthe day; on the second of these heads we have thrown together a fewhints, which may, probably prove entertaining to our readers.
The English are not—you know, reflective public—amusical people; this has been said over and over again in themusical and dramatic critiques of the newspapers. True it is thatwe have no national music, like our neighbours the Welsh,the Irish, or the Scotch; for our music, like out language, is amere riccifamento, stolen from every nation in Europe. Butour king (God bless him) is an excellent musician, and plays thevioloncello most delightfully; and we have an Academy of Music.Then we have an Italian Theatre that burns the feet and fingers ofall who meddle with its management—witness, Mr. Ebers, who,by being "married" to sweet sounds, lost the enormous sum of47,000l.—it must be owned, an unfortunate match, or asDr. Franklin would have said, "paying rather too dear for hiswhistle." We have too an English Opera House, where scarcelyany but foreign music is heard, and which, to theever-lasting credit of its management, has transplanted from thewarm climes of the south to our ungenial atmosphere, some of thefinest compositions in the continental schools of modern music.Success has, however, attended most of their enterprises; for thetaste of the English for foreign music is by no means a modernmania. From Pepys's Diary we learn that the first company ofItalian singers came here in the reign of Charles II.: they werebrought by Killigrew from Venice, about 1688; but they did notperform whole operas, only detached scenes in recitative, and notin any public theatre, but in the houses of the nobility. Thus,Italian music was loved and cultivated very early in England, andLondon was the next capital, after Vienna, which established andsupported an Italian Opera. But, as we never do things by halves,we had soon afterwards, two opposition houses. This proves that theEnglish have a taste for music; indeed they have much morejudgment than some of their neighbours, which makes it still moreto be regretted that nothing is done in England towards theadvancement of music as a science. Is the world of sound and thesoul of song exhausted? Why should we, who are marching in everyother direction, stand still in this? But no; what Orpheus did withmusic, we are striving to accomplish by steam; whathe effected by quietly touching his lyre, we study with theatmospheres and condensers of high and low pressure engines.
The writer of a delightful paper in the Foreign Review,No. 3, in tracing the rise and progress of music, inquires what hasbecome of "its loftier pretensions, its celestial attributes, itsmoral and political influence." He then facetiously observes, "Howshould we marvel to see the Duke of Wellington, like anotherEpaminondas, take his flute out of his pocket to still the clamourof the opposition, or Mr. Peel reply to the arguments of Mr.Huskisson with an allegro on the fiddle."
The Greeks were not such grave people as some may be in