408 The Musing 'Musician. fOcT. 



amidst the wreck of my property, my favourite violin had been pre- 

 served. I wondered moreover whether my eldest boy's voice had turned 

 out a tenor, and whether the other had left off playing on the jew's-harp. 

 But my attention was soon called to the state of public affairs, and I 

 began to marvel as to the improvements that had been effected and the 

 changes that had happened during the period of my trance. My first 

 conjecture was whether the National Debt and the Pimlico Palace were 

 still standing:' or had Rothschild paid the one out of his own pocket, as 

 an acknowledgment for the admission of himself and his people into 

 parliament ; Nash being condemned to inhabit the other through all 

 eternity, as a punishment for building it. I took some pains to 

 calculate how many new worlds Mr. Buckingham had discovered in the 

 course of his voyage round this ; an excursion undertaken with so much 

 regard to the interests of science, and with such manifest indifference 

 and detriment to his own. I wondered also whether there was anybody 

 in existence that recollected who Mr. Milton Montgomery was ; or 

 whether the exact extent and duration of a modern immortality had 

 been finally fixed ! Had the nation begun to like music, or did they 

 only patronize it ! Had Listen really assumed, on his retirement, the 

 honours of the baronetcy (I tried to imagine a Sir John Liston) to 

 which rumour had assigned him the right ; and had the mariner-monarch, 

 King William, called Mr. T. P. Cooke to the peerage, as a reward for 

 his talent in the personation of nautical characters, and making the 

 navy popular ! I felt a desire to know whether Sir Francis Burdett 

 had ever ascertained the difference between water and prussic-acid ; and 

 how many revolutions had taken place in St. Giles's since 1830 ! Who was 

 Lord Mayor and were state-carriages drawn by steam ! I indulged in 

 a momentary surmise whether steam had been rendered applicable to the 

 purposes of public orations, by bringing one vapour to act upon another ; 

 and whether La Porte had introduced it into the Opera to give effect to 

 the chorusses, and to relieve the wind-instruments. Had the works of 

 any more of our popular authors been advertised at half-price ! I hoped 

 that the army had recovered from the shock which it sustained in the 

 loss of its mustachios. Had the North- West Passage been discovered ! 

 if so, had Sir Edward Parry, or any navigator in the ocean of 



human nature, found out and here my mind rambled over an 



infinite catalogue of desiderata, comprising the integrity of a stock- 

 jobber, the independence of a state-pensioner, the morality of an 

 actress, the skill of a self-taught curer of consumptions, the enlighten- 

 ment of his patients, the unimpeachable honour of a representative, the 

 incorruptible honesty of an elector, the diffidence of a counsellor, the 

 disinterestedness of a subscriber to public charities, the meek-heartedness 

 of a judge, the sincerity of a saint, the dignity of a city magistrate, the 

 love of criticism of an artist, the conscience and classic taste of a govern- 

 ment architect, the humour of a translator of farces, the anything of a 



fashionable novelist, the But I broke off, as I do now, in 



the middle ; I had stumbled over more improbabilities than the 

 most sagacious expounder of mysteries, the most enthusiastic sup- 

 porter of the Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge, could hope to dis- 

 cover between this and the millenium. A thousand questions started 

 up involuntarily, pressing for answers on all subjects, from poetry to 

 pugilism. Every thing had acquired an interest from time the most 



