T H O 



393 



T H O 



the age of 44. There is an inscription to his memory, by 

 Thomas Warton, in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey. 

 (Baker's BiograpMa Dramatica, by Reed and Jones.) 

 THOROUGH-BASE, the art of playing (on keyed in- 

 struments, and according to the rules of harmony) an 

 accompaniment from figures representing chords, such 

 figures being placed either over or under the notes of the 

 instrumental base staff. This is one of the many absurd 

 terms employed in music, and its meaning is altogether 

 arbitrary. 



The figures used in Thorough-Base are the nine units. 

 These represent certain intervals or sounds. Thus a 6 

 placed over a c in the base, points out A as an accompani- 

 ment : and that figure also implies two other notes attend- 

 ant on it, namely, the 3rd and 8th, which are called the 

 accompaniments of the 6th. A and a 5 placed under 



it (r\ indicate the intervals of the 6th and 5th played 



together ; and also, as accompanying notes, the 3rd and 

 8th. The figures 3, 5, and 8, singly, or together, represent 

 the perfect or common chord. But in Thorough-Base a base 

 note without any figure is supposed to carry a perfect chord. 

 The chords are, as a general rule, assigned to the right 

 hand of the performer, and the intervals are, in most 

 cases, counted from an octave above the figured note. 

 This will be more clearly understood by referring to the 

 articles ACCOMPAMMENT, CHORD, and HARMONY. 



The following is a tabular view of the figures used in 

 Thorough-Bate io represent chords, together with those, 

 not written, but understood, representing the accompani- 

 ments which, with the base, form the chords: 



( 'lionls ilniirnatrd 



3rd, accompanied by a 

 5th, 



8th, 



Oth, 



7th, 



2"<1,} 



, ('sometimes called the llth), 

 | accompanied by a . 



'?th,|accompanied by an . . 



6th (sharp 6th) 

 Oth, , 



Jth,} 



7th) 



Accompanying 

 intervals. 



5th and 8th. 

 3rd and 8th. 

 5th and 3rd. 

 3rd and 8th. 



8th. 



3rd, 5th, and 8th. 



3rd and 8th. 



major 6th. 

 6th. 



\5th and 8th. 

 8th. 



3rd and 5th. 

 5th. 



3rd. 



5th, 4th, and 2nd. 



BH other chords of an extraordinary kind are occa- 

 I : but they are always clearly denoted, in 

 Thorough-Base, by an ample number of figures. 



The above chords exemplified. 





\\heh two figures are placed in succession over one base 

 P. C., No. 1537. 



note, the time of the latter is divided between them. 

 Example : 



56 43 08 



A sharp, or flat, or natural, placed alone over a base 

 note, relates solely to the 3rd. Example : 



When other intervals are to be raised or lowered, the pro- 

 per characters for the purpose are prefixed to them. A 

 dash through a figure is equivalent to a sharp. 



The practice of figuring a base staff, whether in a score 

 or in the part assigned to a keyed instrument, has fallen 

 into disuse, the harmony being now fully and clearly pre- 

 sented to the eye of the accompanyist in notes placed in a 

 treble staff over the base. But a knowledge of what is 

 yet too commonly misnamed Thorough-base, that is to say, 

 harmony, is absolutely indispensable to the good musician, 

 and very much abbreviates the labour of those who, as 

 amateurs, only aspire to a practical skill either as vocal or 

 instrumental performers. The rules of harmony stand in 

 the same relation to music as those of grammar do to lan- 

 guage. 



The invention of a Figured Base (Basso Cifrato, as the 

 Italians so well denominate it) has been stated to have 

 taken place in 1605, and is commonly attributed to Ludo- 

 vico Viadana, Maestro di Cappella at the cathedral of 

 Mantua. But this kind of musical abbreviation was earlier 

 practised, and by an English composer, Richard Deering, 

 who, in 1597, published his Cantiones Sacrce, at Antwerp, 

 in which a figured base appears. And we have now before 

 us Jacopo Peri's serious opera Euridice, printed at Flo- 

 rence in 1GOO, in which the base is figured throughout. 

 Lying by us also is Caccini's Nuove Mitsiche, likewise 

 printed at Florence, but one year later, and here we find 

 the base regularly figured. The edition of the latter work 

 referred to by Dr. Burney, is dated Venezia, 1615 ; it is to 

 be presumed therefore that the active historian of music 

 was not so fortunate as to have met with the first edition 

 of Caccini's remarkably curious and now very rare work. 



THOU, JACQUES-AUGUSTE DE (or, as he culled 

 himself in Latin, Jacobus Augustus Thuanus), was born at 

 Paris, on the 8th of October, 1553: he was the third son 

 of Christophc de Thou, first president of the parlement of 

 Paris, and of his wife Jacqueline Tuellen dc Celi. Besides 

 their three sons and four daughters, who grew to be men 

 and women, De Thou's parents lost six children in infancy ; 

 and he himself was so weak and sickly a child till he 

 reached his fifth year, that he was not expected to live. 

 In the exemption which this state of health procured him 

 in his childhood and early boyhood from severer task- 

 work, he amused himself in cultivating a turn for draw- 

 ing, which was hereditary in his family ; and in this way, 

 he tells us himself, he learned to write before he had 

 learned to read. Although originally intended for the 

 church, he went in his early studies the whole round of 

 literature and science as then taught ; and while yet only 

 in his eighteenth year he had conceived from the perusal 

 of some of his writings so great an admiration of the cele- 

 brated jurist Cujacius, that he proceeded to Valence in 

 Dauphinc-, and attended his lectures on Papinian. Here 

 he met with Joseph Scaliger, with whom he contracted an 

 intimate friendship, which was kept up for the thirty-eight 

 remaining years that Scaliger lived. In 1572, after he had 

 been a year at Valence, he was recalled home by his 

 father ; and he arrived in Paris in time to be present at the 

 marriage of Henry, the young king of Navarre, and to wit- 

 less the horrors of the massacre of St. Bartholomew which 



VOL. XXIV.-3 E 



