1879.] on Belh. 100 



into cold water ; lie then broko it, and after a glance at it, took a 

 couple more blocks of tin and threw tliem into tlic furnace. In- 

 stantly they dissolved like wax. But what effect could that have 

 upon such a mass ? It was rule of thumb ; he obeyed an instinct 

 which he could no more explain than the skilled doctor can explain 

 why he varies slightly your prescription, or pitches upon the appro- 

 priate remedy — instinct born of accumulated experience wliich cannot 

 be taught. We may sneer at all this rule of thumb, this want of 

 science, but would it not be wiser to make as good bells before wo 

 sneer at the way in which good bells are made ? 



IV. 



I will close with a few remarks on bell music. I shall leave to 

 others the task of descanting on bell-ringing, which I do not call bell 

 music, although it has the sort of musical quality possessed by scales 

 and exercises. It is well known that our peals of bells are swung 

 right round on wheels, and thus each time a stiff blow is delivered, 

 and a proportionate shock im^jarted to the tower and bell-frame. 

 Before Elizabeth's time only the half wheel was used, so bells could 

 never be swung fairly up ; but the art of bell-ringing made a giant 

 stride when Fabian Stedman, about 1567, invented a system of bell 

 notation by which changes on a few bells might be rung ad injinitum. 



Start with three bells, 1, 2, 3, and proceed 1, 3, 2 ; 2, 1,*3; 2, 3, 

 1 ; 3, 1, 2 ; 3, 2, 1 ; it is much simpler than writing a tune, and has 

 the merit of a perfectly purgatorial prolongation, so that it would 

 take ninety-one years to ring the changes on twelve bells, at the rate 

 of two strokes a second, and the full changes on twenty-four bells 

 would occupy one hundred and seventeen thousand billions of years. 

 No one can watch the skilled ringer without admiration at his lithe- 

 ness, readiness, and the deft, clever manipulation of that treacherous 

 rope that has to be coquetted with and released at intervals under 

 penalty of dragging the luckless ringer up to the roof, and there 

 breaking his skull. No one can look at the ingenious arithmetical 

 progressions displayed in Stedman's " Tintinnalogia " without ad- 

 miration of a kind ; but this hunting up and down, the dodging and 

 snapping, the plain bob, and the extreme change, is not music, 

 although it may be prolonged for ninety or a billion years; it is 

 exercise, it develops muscle, quickness, and it promotes thirst. 

 On a summer evening, some way off, it is pleasant enough, especially 

 if heard only at intervals ; but the bell-ringer's paradise is the 

 musician's Inferno ! 



Nothing can justify the practice of putting a citizen of London 

 through two hours of change ringing with twelve heavy bells by 

 Taylor of Loughborough, and the surest way to duter the public from 

 providing a delicious Belgian carillon of forty bells for the sister 

 tower is to make them sa2)i)ose that it will produce a sound similar to 

 the present peal. 



