Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 046.djvu/426

416 of the crowds who ordinarily fill those receptacles, "these feel not music's genuine power;" and beautifully does he long to change the "long-breathed singer's uptrilled strain," for the melodies of the unnoticed minstrel, who

Byron is on my side, notwithstanding he asserts himself to be "a liege and loyal admirer of Italian music." The clever stanza which dashes off the "long evenings of duets and trios," wants the feeling—marred as its effect is by the jingling rhyme—which characterises the following one, in which he speaks of

Yes! it is not the grand crash of the orchestra, or the painful effort of the concert-room—it is not your "Babylon's bravuras" that stir the heart of the wanderer who roams "remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow," among strangers in a strange land; but the honest simple strains of the people—homely things which sink deep into the home-sick heart—strains which have cheered his evening hours among friends far away—remembrances of all that man holds dearest—of friends, of kindred, of love, of home. There is many a hardy Swiss heart that melts at the Ranz des Vaches, to which the overture to Guillaume Tell would be an unintelligible and powerless congregation of sounds.

"Music," says Addison, "is to deduce its laws and rules from the general sense and taste of mankind, and not from the principles of the art itself; or, in other words, the taste is not to conform to the art, but the art to the taste. Music is not designed to please only chromatic ears, but all that are capable of distinguishing harsh from agreeable notes. A man of an ordinary ear is a judge whether a passion is expressed in proper sounds, and whether the melody of those sounds be more or less pleasing."

To these "chromatic ears" it is the fashion now-a-days for John Bull to pretend—and he seems determined to wear them long enough in all conscience: but, though he has forsaken the national muse to attach himself with all the fervour of a renegade to her foreign sisters, I cannot help thinking, and hoping, that we shall yet see the day when he will be pleased to resume the more "ordinary" organs which naturally belong to him—when the strains "which pleased of yore the public ear" shall once more claim their ancient place in his estimation; and the manes of the exasperated mayoress be appeased by the restoration of the long-exiled "simple ballat."