[ 404 ] [OCT. 



THE MUSING MUSICIAN. 



I BEG leave to present my card, and to solicit the reader's pa- 

 tronage, as a professor of music. Fifty summers and winters have 

 passed over my head, I have not, however, kept time in the 

 orchestra of life for life may be aptly likened to an orchestra, 

 whose best performance is but an overture, a promise of something 

 to come; a place where the thunder of the drum and the whisper 

 of the flute, the light violin and the heavy violoncello, are by turns 

 uppermost, and whose most complicated harmony may be entirely 

 jarred by the error of one solitary fiddler a Nero, or a Napoleon ; I 

 have not, I say, taken part in this performance for half a century, 

 without acquiring a certain degree of experience, and picking up a con- 

 siderable number of axioms which I believe to be incontrovertible. One 

 of these is, that people who go to parties are more unreasonable than the 

 rest of the world ; another is, that the man who hath f( music in his 

 soul" hath seldom any mercy in it for the musician ; a third is, that 

 gentlemen quadrilles being once started in an assembly continue 

 dancing for the rest of their lives, until the gout seizes hold of them ; 

 and that ladies never do sit down afterwards. Your quadrille, I am 

 perfectly convinced, is your only perpetual motion. Dancing, to women 

 especially, is like a hoop, which they twirl round and round without 

 coining to an end. They seem to imagine that a ball is, in accordance 

 with its designation, globular ; and that, having once commenced, there 

 cannot possibly be any termination to it. I never yet met with a female 

 that would acknowledge herself fatigued : if she danced well. They 

 are always ready to go on, and never willing to go home. They have 

 no notion of giving over they do not know what breaking-up means- 

 they think the chalk looks as fresh on the floor as ever they wonder 

 what the old gentleman, who generally goes to bed at eleven, means by 

 gaping at six in the morning they vow, with Juliet, that it is the night- 

 ingale and not the lark that sings they promise to accept you as a 

 partner in the next dance but nine ; and they never will, in short, put 

 an end to their sport until they fall fast asleep and even then they will 

 be apt to make a somnambular movement, and go through the figures 

 with their eyes shut. They dream that they dance. 



If this be the case and it will scarcely be contradicted with females 

 generally, to what a height must the evil be increased with those in par- 

 ticular who are celebrated, as so many are, for something or other 

 talents, beauty, a volume of poems, or a rich relation in a banking-esta- 

 blishment. When I enter a room, and find myself surrounded by pretty 

 faces, and figures not too fat, I prepare myself for the worst. But if, 

 in addition to this disastrous display, I discover that there are two or 

 three of them who dance divinely, two or three more tolerably, and 

 another two or three, who, though they cannot dance at all, have inhe- 

 rited such things as ankles ; if I have reason to apprehend that none of 

 the gentlemen are afflicted with the rheumatism or cork legs ; if I see 

 a harp within reach of somebody that has been taught to play, not 

 because she has a taste for music, but because she has a white arm or a 

 diamond-bracelet ; if I find a lady in the room who, happening to have 

 a good set of teeth, happens to have also what is termed a voice a 

 female professor of science and sentiment, that has all Bayley's ballads 

 by heart ; when I make any one of these dreadful and by no means 



