us all to have a little music, and not less
good for the horn-handed artisan than for the
white-handed gentleman; it is—let us be
thankful for it apart of our nature to enjoy
the concourse of sweet sounds. But the
knotty question is, How are those who, in
language which used to be employed more
frequently in past days than in the present,
were called the lower classes, to obtain their
music? When a man wishes to smoke his
pipe after a hard day's work, may he, or
may he not, listen to music at the same time?
Shall music be employed as an antidote to
pipes and pints; or shall it be rather an
addition, an admixture, an emollient, or
something which shall rub off the crudities and
open the heart to kindliness? Much may be
said on both sides of this, as of most other
questions; but as operatives, like men of
better fortune, will have music in some way
or other, there is a problem yet to be solved,
how the music can be made to do the most
good and the least harm.

In London the street musicians have
improved in skill within the last few years;
while the German bands and the monster
organs, albeit somewhat rough and noisy, do
certainly familiarise the ear with much
German and Italian music of a superior kind.
It is the evening music, however, the music
listened to within a building when the
labours of the day are over, that somewhat
embarrasses our licensing magistrates and
our Lord Chamberlains.

During the reign of Charles the Second,
according to Sir John Hawkins, the humble
classes in London were dependent on such
occasional music as the publicans thought
proper to give them. There was no variety
of parts, no commixture of different instruments.
Half-a-dozen fiddlers would scrape
Sellenger's Bound, or John Come Kiss Me,
or Old Simon the King, with divisions, till
themselves and their audience were tired;
after which, as many players on the haut-
boy would, in the most harsh and
discordant tones, grate forth Green Sleeves,
Yellow Stockings, Gillian of Croydon, or
some such common dance-tune: and the
people thought it fair music. It was about
this time that an extraordinary man
exhibited a musical soul in the midst of
sooty black diamonds. This was Thomas
Britton, a small-coal man, and the founder of
modern concerts. He lived in Clerkenwell,
and hawked small-coal about the streets;
and in the evening, retiring to his humble
abode, and making all as clean and tidy as
he could, he was wont to assemble round
him singers and players who could join in a
concert. His voice was so musical, and his
taste so good, that his coal-shed concerts
became attractive to persons far above his own
station in life. Dr. Pepusch the musician,
the great Handel, Woollaston the painter,
Hughes, a poet of those days, were among
the guests; and not unfrequently the beautiful
and witty Duchess of Queensberry would
order her carriage thitherward, and enjoy a
coal-shedful of beautiful music. But this tells
nothing concerning the state of music among
the working-classes at the time. Britton was
a man gifted beyond his class; he belonged
in occupation to the humble, but in taste to
the refined.

Everything tends to show that in the last
century, the masses of London either had
no music, or music of a very rude description.
Of course such men as Steele and
Addison, and such papers as those in the
Spectator and Tatler, revealed a higher taste.
One of Isaac Bickerstaff's correspondents
claimed to have discovered an infallible
remedy for the spleen. He found that "sweet,
easy flowing numbers are oft superior to our
noblest medicines. When the spirits are low,
and nature sunk, the muse, with sprightly
and harmonious notes, gives an unexpected
turn with a grain of poetry, which I prepare
without the use of mercury. I have done
wonders in this kind; for the spleen is like
the tarantula; the effects of whose malignant
poison are to be prevented by no other
remedy but the charms of music." All this
pleasant badinage apart, however, there is
abundant evidence that, throughout the first
half of the last century, and far into the
reign of George the Third, the nobility were
in general gay and frivolous, and the working-
classes ignorant and gross; characteristics
which showed themselves in respect to
music as to other matters.

About a century ago, Fielding wrote an
essay, intended really to point out the
degraded state of morals among the people,
but conveying, at the same time, a severe
sarcasm on the upper classes. He seems
to have thought that pleasures among
the great could do no harm, but that
the pleasures of the poor required sharp
attention. His essay was An Inquiry into
the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers,
&c.; and in the course of his argument he
observes: "Pleasure hath been, and always
will be, the principal business of persons of
fashion and fortune, and more especially of
the ladies, for whom I have infinitely too
great an honour and respect to rob them
of any their least amusement. Let them
have their plays, operas, and oratorios; their
masquerades and ridottos; their assemblies,
dances, routs, riots, and hurricanes; their
Ranelagh and Vauxhall: their Bath, Tunbridge,
Bristol, Scarborough, and Cheltenham:
and let them have them have their beaux and
daughters to attend them at all these; it is
the only use for which such beaux are fit;
and I have seen, in the course of my life, that
it is the only use to which, by sensible women,
they are applied. Such places of pleasure,
therefore, as are totally set apart for the use
of the great world, I meddle not with." But
he did meddle with the amusements of the
poor. There was so much robbery and