Various

“ The Philharmonic concerts are very fashionable. It is good taste, socially and artistically, to be present; and, consequently, the room is always crowded by an assemblage who display most of the characteristics of an Opera audience. The musical notabilities of town always muster in full force at the Philharmonic. Composers, executants, critics, amateurs, and connoisseurs, are all there, watching with the greatest care the execution of those famous works, the great effect of which can only be produced by the most wary and appreciative tenderness of rendering. ”

“ The extraordinary choral effects produced in the performance of the Huguenots almost bewildered the hearers; and the wondrous lights and shades of sound given in many of the oratorios, are little behind the dramatic achievement. The aspect of Exeter Hall on an oratorio night is one of the grandest things in London. The vastness of the assemblage, the great mountain of performers, crested by the organ, and rising almost to the ceiling, are thoroughly impressive, while the first burst of the opening chorus is grand in the extreme. ”

“ Everybody is in evening dress; the ladies very gay, and the party very quiet—a still, drawing-room sort of air presides over the whole. Many of the ladies are young—quite girls; and a good many of the gentlemen are solemn old foggies, who appear strongly inclined to go to sleep, and, in fact, sometimes do. Meantime, the music goes on. A long, long sonata or concerto—piano and violin, or piano, violin, and violoncello—is listened to in profound silence, with a low murmur of applause at the end of each movement. ”

“ We have more than once encountered a sober party upon their annual visit to some country church-yard tomb, of which, by virtue of some bequest—which provides them with a good dinner upon the occasion—they are the appointed guardians. The worshipful members of the London companies sometimes choose to rest from their labours in a rural grave; and when they do, survivors are always to be found not unwilling to enjoy once a year a pensive holiday, coupled with the creature comforts, which the quiet comrade whose behest they execute has taken care to provide for them. ”

“ We only affected to love music. It was intellectual, spiritual, in all respects creditable to our moral nature, to be able to appreciate Mozart and Beethoven, and so we set up for connoisseurs, and martyrised ourselves that Europe might think us musical. Is there more truth in this theory than the other? Hypocrisy is not generally so lasting as the musical fervour has proved itself to be. A fashion is the affair of a season ”

“ The discipline of their chief is perfect, and as rigid as it is excellent. The power which this gentleman possesses over his musical troops is very curious. The whole mass of performers seem to wait upon his will as the spirits did on Prospero. At the spreading of his arms, the music dies away to the most faintly-whispered murmurs. ”

“ But whether the music-publishing and opera-box-letting firm be the real concert-giver, or merely the agent, to it is left the whole of the nice operation of 'getting up' the entertainment. It has then exhausted all the dodges of puffery in pumping up an unusual degree of excitement. The affair is to be a 'festival' or a 'jubilee;' 'all the musical talent' of London is to be concentrated; the continent has been dragged for extra-ordinary executive attractions; every musical hit of the season is to be repeated ”

“ It would be difficult for any eccentric testator in the present day to hit upon a new method of disposing of the wealth which he can no longer keep. Every device for the exercise of posthumous generosity seems to have been exhausted long ago.
The trust-estates, the source of so many of the city of London charities, are mostly, if not all, under the control of the corporate companies. How they are managed, is a secret altogether unknown to the public, and of which, indeed, the livery and freemen of some of the companies have but a very limited knowledge. ”

“ Everybody seems to know everybody else, and one general atmosphere of genial intercourse prevails throughout the room.
Let us change the scene to a classic concert of quite another kind. In a quiet West-end street, we are in a room of singular construction. It is in the form of a right-angled triangle; and at the right angle, upon a small dais, is placed the pianoforte and the desks, and so forth, for the performers. The latter are thus visible from all points; but about one-half the audience in each angle of the room is quite hidden from the other. ”

“ Time has been when they came to London for cash, not renown: now they come for both. A London reputation is beginning to rival a Parisian vogue, besides being ten times more profitable; and, accordingly, from every musical corner in Christendom, phenomena of art pour in, heralded by the utmost possible amount of puffing, and equally anxious to secure English gold and a London reputation. It is strange to observe how universally the musical tribute is paid. A tenor turns up from some Russian provincial town; a basso works himself to London from a theatre in Constantinople ”

“ It would be perhaps difficult to find a single church in all the little towns and hamlets within a dozen miles of London, which does not contain one tenant at least who has thus secured permanent possession of his last resting-place. So strong is this feeling in some individuals, that they shrink from confiding even in the stone-vaults in the interior of a city church. Thus, Sir William Rawlins, not so very long ago, bequeathed a certain sum of money for the preservation of his tomb and monument in Bishopsgate Church. ”

“ The audience are in the highest degree attentive. The rules forbid applause, but a gentle murmur of admiration rises at the close of almost every morceau. Here and there, you have a practical amateur, or a group of such with the open score of the oratorio before them, eagerly following the music. Often these last gentlemen are members of the rival Society, and, as might be expected, pick plenty of holes in the execution of their opponents, for which charitable purpose only they have probably attended. ”

“ The whole parish felt for the poor young man, who had been so hardly used by his mother, and many were the inquiries made for him at the farmhouse. There was wild wo there, for every day he got worse; and within the week, Menie was left a widow. Lady Catherine had gone back to Paris at the close of the season; one of her married daughters was in Italy, and the other in Switzerland; but two cousins of their father were to be found in England; and Master Arthur was laid in the family vault, under our old parish church, before the intelligence reached them. ”

“ The practice of leaving money for the sustentation of tomb-stones and monuments, appears to have prevailed for many generations; and may be very naturally accounted for, by the repugnance which most men would feel, to the idea of having their bones knocked about by the sexton's spade, and then wheeled off to the bone-house, if there happens to be a bone-house, or shot into the neighbouring river, or on a farmer's dung-heap, if there is no such convenience as a bone-house at hand. ”

“ If so, considering the amount of music actually listened to every year in London and the provinces, we were strangely given to an amusement which yielded us no pleasure; we were continually imposing on ourselves the direst and dreariest of tasks ”

“ Half the audience probably know every bar of the music by heart, and no inconsiderable number could perhaps perform it very decently themselves. It is indeed at these quartett and quintett meetings, that you see genuine specimens of musical knowledge and musical enthusiasm. They take place by half-dozens during the season; and you always find the same class of audience, often the same individuals, regularly ranged before the executants. ”

“ Near the castle there stood a farmhouse, occupied by an old man whose great-grandfather had cultivated the same fields. He was not rich, but much respected by his neighbours for an honest, upright life. His wife was as old as himself. They had been always easy-living people, and had no child but one only daughter. Menie was a delicately pretty girl, a little spoiled, perhaps, in her station, for both father and mother made a queen of her at home. ”

“ Among the lions of Rome during the last twenty years, not the least attractive, especially for literary visitors, was the celebrated Cardinal Mezzofanti. Easy of access to foreigners of every condition, simple, unpretending, cheerful, courteous even to familiarity, he never failed to make a most favourable impression upon his visitors ”

“ The worthy man has long ago married his landlady's daughter, and been blessed with a family sufficient to fill a church-pew. My own adventures—how I grew from garment to garment, how I became a law-student, and at length a writer myself—have little to do with the present narrative, and are therefore spared the reader in detail; but the first startling intelligence I received from home was, that English John had resigned his important office at the toll-house, and gone, nobody knew whither! ”

“ Let us pass from Exeter Hall to Hanover Square. Here, in the Queen's Concert Room—a salle which once was smart, and the decorations of which were fashionable seventy years ago—we have unnumbered concerts, and chief among them the twelve annual performances of the Philharmonic Society. The 'Philharmonic,' as it is conversationally called, holds almost the rank of a national institution. The sovereign patronises it in an especial manner. It is connected with the Royal Academy of Music, and Her Majesty's private band is recruited from the ranks of its orchestra. ”

“ The pupils and their families form the majority of the audience, interspersed with a few pianoforte amateurs, and those fanatici per la musica who are to be found wherever a violin is tuned, or a piano is opened.
Another species of classic concert is to be found in the quartett-meetings. These take place in some small concert-room, such as that I have described, or at the houses of the executants; and the audience comprehends a far larger proportion of gentlemen than the last-mentioned entertainments. The performers are four—pretty sure to be gentlemen of the highest professional abilities. ”

“ The infinite height appears, in short, like the infinite depth, and we knowing not precisely where we stand between the two immensities of depth and height! The shapes evolved by the wonderful telescope of Lord Rosse are, many of them, absolutely fantastical; wonder and awe are mingled with almost ridiculous feelings in contemplating the strange apparitions—strange monstrosities we had almost called them—that are pictured on the background of the illustrations. ”

“ One aggregation looms forth out of the darkness like the skeleton face of some tremendous mammoth, or other monstrous denizen of ancient times, with two small fiery eyes, however, gazing out of its great hollow orbits ”

“ The Roman Catholic service has long since given place to a Protestant one, and the band of officiating priests has dwindled down to one clergyman—while the value of the estate has increased perhaps fiftyfold. At the present moment, the sum which the estate originally produced is paid over to the church-wardens, who are at times a little puzzled as to what to do with it. They get rid of a good portion in this way: at every service which is held in the church, they place a bottle of the best sherry which can be procured for money upon the vestry-table ”

“ It is true that at the period of which we speak, Bologna lay upon the high-road to Rome, and that travellers more frequently rested for a space upon their journey, than in these days of steam-boat and railway communication. But, even then, the opportunities of intercourse with foreign-speaking visitors in Bologna were few and inconsiderable compared with the prodigious advances which, under all his disadvantages, Mezzofanti contrived to make. The ordinary European languages presented but little difficulty ”

“ The object of such bequests as these is sufficiently plain: the donors had evidently in view the counteracting of the wretched tendency of the old poor-law, which, by giving the mother of an illegitimate child a claim upon the parish funds, actually placed a premium upon female frailty.
In London, there are charitable dispositions and bequests for the nursery of every virtue that could be named, but more especially of industry, providence, and thrift. A man may be brought into the world by voluntary contributions ”

“ The foreigners who hold places in the orchestra are resident, and in some sort naturalised, but the bulk of the executants are English. To be a member of the Philharmonic orchestra is, indeed, to take a sort of degree in executive music, and at once stamps the individual as a performer of distinguished merit. ”

“ L.5 to the poor of St Giles's yearly in bread; to the poor of St Sepulchre's yearly in bread, L.5, to be given every Sabbath-day in the churches.' The amount of bread at the present time given away in London under this disposition, supplemented by some smaller bequests, is sixty-eight half-quartern loaves a week. The same poor persons, when they once get on the list, continue to receive the bread during their whole lives, unless they cease to reside in the parish, or are struck off the list of pensioners for misconduct. ”

“ The next news we heard was, that the old farmer and his wife had set out to bring home their daughter and son-in-law, saying—poor people, in their pride or folly—that Menie and her husband could live with them till Providence cleared their way to the estate, which nobody could keep from them. I believe it was that speech, coming to her ears by some busy tongue or other, that made Lady Catherine so bitter afterwards; but Master Arthur and his bride came home to the farmhouse, where the parlour and the best bedroom were set apart for their use ”