now is deafening when we are in the midst of it; but in some secluded place, such as Lincoln's Inn Gardens, it is the ever-present sullen sound of angry waves dashing upon the shingles. The horn that proclaimed extraordinary news, running to and fro among peaceful squares and secluded courts, was sometimes a relief. The bell of the dustman was not altogether unpleasant. In the twilight hour, when the shutters were not yet closed, and the candles were not yet burning, the tinkle of the muffin-man had something in it very soothing. It is gone. But the legislators have still left us our street music. There was talk of its abolition; but they have satisfied themselves with enacting that musicians, on being warned to depart from the neighbourhood of the house of any householder by the occupier or his servant, or by a police-constable, incur a penalty of forty shillings by refusal. De la Serre, who came to England with Mary de Medici, when she visited the Queen of Charles I., is enthusiastic in his praises of the street music of London:

-"In all public places, violins, hautboys, and other kinds of instruments are so common, for the gratification of individuals, that in every hour of the day our ears may be charmed with their sweet melody." England was then a musical nation; but from that time nearly to our own her street-music became a thing to be legislated against.

In the days of Elizabeth, and of James and Charles, the people were surrounded with music, and imbued with musical associations. The cittern

was heard in every barber's shop; and even up to the publication of the 'Tatler' it was the same: "Go into a barber's anywhere, no matter in what district, and it is ten to one you will hear the sounds either of a fiddle or guitar, or see the instruments hanging up somewhere." The barbers or their apprentices were the performers: "If idle, they pass their time in life-delighting music." Thus writes a pamphleteer of 1597. Doctor King,

about the beginning of the last century, found the barbers degenerating in their accomplishments, and he assigns the cause: "Turning themselves to periwig-making, they have forgot their cittern and their music." The cittern twanged then in the barbers' shops in the fresh mornings especially; and then came forth the carman to bear his loads through the narrow thoroughfares. He also was musical. We all know how Falstaff describes Justice Shallow: " He came ever in the rear-ward of the fashion, and sung those tunes to the overscutched housewives that he heard the carmen whistle." He had a large stock of tunes. In Ben Jonson's 'Bartholomew Fair,' one of the characters exclaims, "If he meet but a carman in the street, and I find him not loth to keep him off of him, he will whistle him and all his tunes over at night in his sleep." Half a century later even, "barbers, cobblers, and plowmen," were enumerated as "the heirs of music." Who does not perceive that when Isaac Walton's milk maid sings,"Come live with me and be my love,"

street music

she is doing nothing remarkable? These charming words were the common possession of all. The people were the heirs of poetry as well as of music. They had their own delicious madrigals to sing, in which music was "married to immortal verse,"-and they could sing them. Morley, writing in 1597, says, "Supper being ended, and music-books, according to custom, being brought to the table, the mistress of the house presented me with a part, earnestly requesting me to sing; but when, after many excuses, I protested unfeignedly that I could not, every one began to wonder-yea, some whispered to others, demanding how I was brought up.' In a condition of society like this, the must have been worth listening to. "A noise of musicians," as a little band was called, was to be found everywhere; and they attended upon the guests in taverns and ordinaries, and at " good men's feasts" in private houses. In 'The Silent Woman,' it is said, "the smell of the venison, going through the streets, will invite one noise of fiddlers or other ;" and again, "They have intelligence of all feasts; there's good correspondence betwixt them and the London cooks." Feasts were then not mere occasions for gluttony and drunkenness, as they became in the next generation. As the drunkenness went on increasing, the taste for music went on diminishing. In the next century, the Tatler' writes, "In Italy nothing is more frequent than to hear a cobbler working to an opera tune; but, on the contrary, our honest

VOL. II.

D

countrymen have so little an inclination to music, that they seldom begin to sing till they are drunk." Thus we went on till the beginning of the present century, and indeed later. The street music was an indication of the popular taste. Hogarth's blind hautboy-player, and his shrieking ballad-singer, are no caricatures. The execrable sounds which the lame and the blind produced were the mere arts of mendicancy. The principle of extorting money by hideous sounds was carried as far as it could go by a fellow of the name of Keeling, called Blind Jack, who performed on the flageolet with his nose. Every description of street exhibition was accompanied with these terrible noises. The vaulter, and the dancing lass, and the tumbler creeping through a hoop, and the puppet-showman, and the dancing dogs, and the bear and monkey, had each their own peculiar din, whether of drum, fiddle, horn, or bagpipes, compared with which the music of Morose's bear-ward and fencer would have been as the harmony of the spheres.

WALPOLE'S WORLD OF FASHION.

At

"WHEN I was very young, and in the height of the opposition to my father, my mother wanted a large parcel of bugles; for what use I forget. As they were then out of fashion, she could get none. last she was told of a quantity in a little shop in an obscure alley in the City. We drove thither; found a great stock; she bought it, and bade the proprietor send it home. He said, 'Whither?' To Sir Robert Walpole's.' He asked, coolly, 'Who is Sir Robert Walpole ?""*

6

"What was Strawberry Hill?” might be a similar question with many persons, were we not living in a somewhat different age from that of Sir Robert Walpole. Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill is gone. Its place is being occupied with trim villas, inhabited by a class of whose existence Walpole would have been as ignorant as the city shopkeeper was of the great Sir Robert. The maker of Strawberry Hill-the builder-up of its galleries, and tribunes, and Holbein-chambers-the arranger of its "painted glass and gloom"-the collector of its pictures, and books, and bijouterie, says of himself, "I am writing, I am building-both works that will outlast the memory of battles and heroes!

* Horace Walpole to the Miss Berrys, March 5, 1791.