THE MUSICIAN ABOUT TOWN. 311 



persons engaged during the day behind their counters, performing 

 at night the most lofty compositions of the great musical epic 

 writers, is an object worthy of admiration, and doubtless is produc- 

 ing a beneficial effect upon the thousands who come to improve their 

 moral and intellectual perceptions by listening to those divine homi- 

 lies. It has frequently been remarked, but with what truth we 

 need not here determine, that the lower-middle class of English 

 society are not merely leaving — that they have already left — the 

 aristocracy leagues in the rear upon all questions of intellectual re- 

 finement. The Italian Opera of London is one example in confir- 

 mation of this remark, as regards the cultivation of Music. The 

 compositions listened to night after night by our aristocracy, with 

 so much complacency, at Her Majesty's Theatre, are confessedly, as 

 works of invention and imagination, of the most ephemeral charac- 

 ter. Were it not for the brilliant organs which give them utter- 

 ance, they could not be endured for a night. The majority of that 

 audience estimate the music by the singer of it. They go to hear 

 the trills and flourishes of Rubini, and the modem opera : but the 

 singer is the main attraction. Upon a non-subscription night, how- 

 ever, if an opera of Mozart's be put up, the house is notoriously 

 filled by the middle ranks of society ; and the organ of " the fa- 

 shionable world" amuses its dainty readers by expressions of horror 

 at the vulgar complexion of the pit audience. The foreigner who 

 should estimate the English taste for music by the compositions 

 performed at the Italian Opera, would make as erroneous a calcula- 

 tion as if he were to j udge of our progress in mechanism and fine 

 art by the prizes distributed at some of our public institutions for 

 unmeritorious inventions, and flowers and butterflies painted on 

 vellum. It is to the private societies the foreigner must go, to per- 

 ceive what progress classical music is making in this country : to the 

 quartett and quintett parties, public as well as private ; to the so- 

 cieties which meet for the practice of the Masses of Haydn, Mozart, 

 Beethoven, Cherubini, and Hummel. He should observe the au- 

 diences at these meetings; at the Sacred Harmonic Society, the 

 Sacred Choral Society, the Classical, City Classical, and Choral 

 Harmonists ; at the Quartett and Classical Concerts ; at the piano- 

 forte soirees of Moscheles and Neates : at all which meetings music 

 is now listened to and evidently relished, which five and twenty 

 years ago would have been laughed at, or performed to empty 

 benches. 



All these are indications of the prevailing taste for good music. 

 The very circumstance of the amateurs having forced the reproduc- 



