and comparison, on which it may be well for
those to fix attention who desire to ascertain
really where England stands among musical
nations—namely, "the music meeting" or
festival, which Handel established as one of the
institutions of this country,—and at a period
anything but auspicious. For then, between the
precepts of the Puritans still at work in those of
a second and third generation,—and the sarcasm
of the Wits, our love of music, yet more our
participation in its production, had sank to being
largely considered as a discredit to men, and a
foolish waste of time among women.—It is no
light tribute to the power of Handel's mighty
poems, unequal, full of plain transcripts from
works already known, hurried out with haste, yet
alone in their sublimity—a series which, in their
world, bear a curious and close analogy to the
plays of Shakespeare—that they spoke at once
to ears so ill prepared to hear as those of
England at the middle of the eighteenth century.
Coarsely flung down on paper as they were,—so
many expedients of an unsuccessful man, far
advanced in life, to retrieve his fortunes,—they
were coarsely and insufficiently performed.—The
Master can only have heard them with his mind's
ear;—so inadequate were the choral and orchestral
provisions of his time to do justice to
his Hallelujah, to his plagues in Israel, and
that unsurpassed song of Miriam's triumph by
the Red Sea. Though the court favoured them,
the public was not on kindly terms with the
court. They had nothing to make their way in
England, but their innate power and glory, and
the complete satisfaction they brought to
England's musical wants. And accordingly, very
shortly after they were produced (the rate of
intercourse in those days considered) they
became as "household words" in certain of our
counties—those betwixt the midland and the
borders of England especially. They got into
the dales of Yorkshire, and the manufacturing
villages of Lancashire and Staffordshire. And
to produce them,, groups of scantily tutored
voices, by nature singularly stout and well-
toned, gradually combined themselves into
choirs so efficient that their fame was noised
abroad. These first Lancashire and
Yorkshire performances of Handel must have been
quaint indeed. Men, not yet very old, have
learned their love of The Messiah, and Samson,
and Saul, and Jeptha, and Judas, in some
mean ill-lighted dissenting chapel of town or
country. How hearty were those honest little
music meetings, with all their flaws and
defects! with perhaps only a bassoon, a bass-
viol, a double bass (and, by way of luxury,
sometimes a flute), to help out the organ. I
have heard no such trebles anywhere else—so
strong, so untiring, and yet so sweet. The
voice seemed to run in families, and the best
voice of the family—not seldom the mother—
would on these occasions represent the Banti,
or Billington, or Mara, who took the principal
solo duty in London.

These good people became so renowned, that
they could not be dispensed with in London at
the playhouse Lent Oratorios—so pleasantly
commemorated by genial Mr. Henry Phillips,
in his late Recollections—and (more august
honour still) at the Ancient Concerts. Thirty
years ago, when the last mentioned orthodox
entertainments were dying of their somnolent
grandeur (Hogarth's scene of a Sleeping
Congregation being nightly performed on empty
benches, except when the Duke of Wellington
was Director for the evening), the chorus was
led by these women from Lancashire, brought
thither by coaches some twenty-eight hours on.
the road; the Middlesex voices being then
rejected as insufficient, and of disagreeable sound.

Besides the centres of popular activity referred
to, "the Music Meeting" had a hold in every
cathedral town, which maintained its choir, and
was surrounded by resident families, with whom
a visit to the pleasures of London was then a
rare treat. Especially to be mentioned among the
oldest festivals, are those of the Three Choirs,
Hereford, Worcester, and Gloucester, which, in
their day, did good service as keeping alive some
taste for high art. The soil, then, throughout
England, was more or less ready for the increase
of cultivation, which has developed itself, within
the period referred to, in so remarkable a
manner.

This began to quicken in London, under the
auspices of some amateurs, who, before "Young
England" had begun to sentimentalise on the
right of labour to have some pleasure, took the
matter fairly into their own hands: amateurs,
busily engaged during the day, at the desk,
and at the counter, having small leisure for the
practice of instruments, but a great desire to
sing. Without high patronage, without any
great pretence, the Sacred Harmonic Society
was founded in the Strand, at Charing-cross,
and St. James-street; at first its audiences were
principally confined to a circle made up of the
friends of its performers. The Ancient Concerts
died, and well it was they did so, of their own
dulness. The public had got past Lenten
oratorios at Drury Lane and Covent Garden;
where the Death of Nelson and Total Eclipse
jostled each other; when the Miriam of Israel
had to sing Cherry Ripe, and I've been Roaming,
and the long farrago of medley music was
wound up with a Hallelujah. Thus, in spite
of manifest imperfections in performance (which
were amended as prosperity brought counsel, not
insolence, with it), the lovers of serious music
began to find their way to Exeter Hall, though
the music meetings there were presided over
by no royalties, nor archbishops, nor cabinet
ministers;—and the undertaking having a healthy
root, and being sagaciously watched over, has
grown to what we have seen it—a society after
its kind unparagoned in Europe.

Simultaneously with the establishment of the
Sacred Harmonic Society, another movement
began in so many different quarters, and under
so many distinct auspices, as to make it clear
that the movement answered, if indeed it
was not created by, a popular necessity. Half a
dozen teachers of part-singing, working on the