6 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE 
and exposes it to be conquer’d by the first 
Temptation which invades it. ** Musical 
instruments were mentioned in seventeenth- 
century inventories, Devizes surgeon Edward Anne 
leaving ‘three pairs of organs, two virginals and one 
chest of violls’, valued at £100 in 1687.°Eighteenth- 
century family group paintings often depict 
musical settings , with singers, harpsichord and 
instrumentalists. Although in the production of 
new music eighteenth-century Britain lagged 
behind Germany, Italy and France, the country was 
receptive to foreign influences. Many Continental 
craftsmen, fleeing from the Seven Years’ War, had 
begun producing reasonably priced musical 
instruments in England. Favourite instruments 
in Devizes were the fiddle, the piano and the flute. 
Newspapers advertised instruction books, such as 
The Complete Tutor to the Violin and the common 
flute was easy to learn. Benjamin Anstie wrote from 
Rowde in 1799 :‘There are four in the family who 
can play on the flute and one on the piano’.*' Amelia 
Anstie thanked her brother Samuel in London for 
procuring a piano for her : ‘It arrived last Saturday 
and it is indeed a very nice one. I like the tone and it 
is really very cheap at eighteen guineas’. ° Dr 
William Barwis possessed a harpsichord by Keene ©’ 
and builder’s wife Mrs Whichcord owned a violin 
and a piano. The prison governor played a flute”, 
and Josiah Eyles Heathcote operated a barrel 
organ.” Such activities were perhaps stimulated by 
musical meetings held in the town once a fortnight 
These were long established, magistrate William 
Hunt attending Devizes concerts regularly in the 
mid-eighteenth century, and paying his 1 guinea 
subscription to William Salmon in April 1741.° 
Singing was widely practised among all classes. 
The resurgence of music in England with the visits 
of Handel, Haydn and Mozart and the composition 
of ballads and operas by native and foreign 
musicians provided a repertory of old and new 
music. Provincial booksellers purveyed sheet music 
and collections of ballads, anthems, country airs, 
catches, glees and opera songs. Elizabeth Blackburn 
noted that Richard Knight’s son, John, ‘like all the 
family had a fine voice and a taste for music’® and 
George Sloper remarked that cooper Thomas 
Wheeler ‘was a very good and fine singer’.” At the 
celebrations on Roundway Hill for the birth of 
James Sutton’s heir in 1783, booths were erected for 
glee singers” and songs and glees were sung after 
the Bear Club annual dinner.’! Salisbury at this time 
enjoyed a reputation as a centre of musical 
excellence, with a music festival dating back to the 
seventeenth century and stimulated by the presence 
of Handel’s friend James Harris and of the 
composer John Marsh between 1776 and 1783. One 
of the most celebrated instrument makers in 
England, Benjamin Banks (1727-1795) made copies 
of Amati’s violins and Stradivari cellos.’”’ Concerts 
were held in the city once a fortnight in winter and 
once a month in summer, sometimes with foreign 
soloists. Lawyer William Wroughton Salmon and 
his wife attended the Music Festival there in 
August 1818” anda Mrs Salmon, perhaps a relative, 
performed regularly at concerts. Musical 
accomplishments were becoming popular for girls. 
An eighteenth-century writer claimed that music 
had ‘the power of filling up agreeably those 
intervals of time which too often hang heavily on 
the hands of women’.”? James Sutton employed a 
music teacher for his daughters,” and a music 
master, Nathaniel Phillips, was a member of the 
Devizes Mercers Company in 1760.” In local 
schools music was part of the curriculum, so music 
making was becoming a part of bourgeois domestic 
life. 
Music provided the background for the 
elaborate ‘Pantheon’ or Temple of Arts staged in 
Devizes by printer and stationer William Harrison 
in 1821 after many years’ preparation, which was 
later taken to Bath, Bristol and London. Displayed 
in an ‘elegant and commodious portable building’ 
the exhibition featured sculptures, paintings, 
lustres and ‘Mechanics’, with works by English, 
Dutch and German artists, illuminated with wax 
lights in chandeliers suspended from eagles. The 
background music, specially selected from ‘British 
and Foreign Masters’, including a ‘self-acting’ 
organ and a Musical Clock, was intended to ‘raise 
the mind. . . upon the soaring wings of ecstasy’. 
Claiming that there was nothing more interesting 
than the study of the several arts and sciences, 
which ‘promotes those alliances and connexions 
which exist among men of science and learning’, 
Harrison appealed for the patronage of ‘a liberal 
and enlightened public’, who doubtless flocked to 
such a dazzling collection of the arts under one roof, 
‘a work differing in every respect from any which 
has ever been offered to the world’.’”° Extravagant as 
his claims were, Harrison must have counted on 
middle class support for a venture which cost him 
over £2,000 and gambled on the growing bourgeois 
love of spectacle and appetite for the arts. 
This general upsurge of interest in the arts was 
reflected in the establishment of theatres. Aping the 
London theatres, playhouses began to appear from 
