Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/618

604 Immyns, an attorney. It embraced men of the working classes, and held meetings on Wednesday evenings for the singing of madrigals, glees, catches, &c. Immyns sometimes read them a lecture on a musical subject, and the society gradually grew rich, and, we believe, still continues a very flourishing association. Though the English opera has never become popular, yet songs and musical pieces have been constantly introduced in the current plays. The composers of such pieces at this period were such men as Purcell, Eccles, Playford, Leveridge, Carey Haydn, Arne, &c. Public gardens became very much the fashion, and in these, at first, oratorios, choruses, and grand musical pieces were performed, but, by degrees, gave way to songs and catches. Vauxhall, originally called Spring Garden, established before the Revolution, became all through this period the fashionable resort of the aristocracy, and to this was added Ranelagh near Chelsea College, a vast rotunda, to which crowds used to flock from the upper circles on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings, to hear the music and singing. These performances spread greatly the taste for music, and probably excited the alarm of the puritanically religious, for there arose a great outcry against using music in churches, as something vain and unhallowed. Amongst the best publications on the science of music during this period were Dr. Holder's "Treatise on the Natural Grounds and Principles of Harmony," 1694; Malcolm's "Treatise on Music, Speculative, Practical, and Historical," 1721; Dr. Pepusch's "Treatise on Harmony," 1731; Dr. Smith's "Harmonics; or, the Philosophy of Musical Sounds;" Avison's "Essay on Musical Expression," 1752. Avison also published twenty-six concertos for a band, which were much admired. ARCHITECTURE.

At this period, both the grand old styles of architecture, the Gothic for ecclesiastical buildings, and the Tudor and Elizabethan for palaces and mansions, had, for a time, run their course. A classical or Italian fashion had come in, and the picturesque churches and halls of our ancestors were deemed barbarous. Men were now taught to see with different eyes; to regard classical architecture, or that which had sprung from it, as the modern Italian language has sprung from the Roman, as all that is beautiful in nature and art: and those lovely and inimitable Christian temples, in which the human mind has revealed its utmost reach of poetry and sublimity—those fabrics, both sacred and domestic, which stand here and there throughout England, like glorious dreams of imagination, or like the conceptions of archangels and the work of angels rather than those of humanity—stones reared into majesty and chiselled into life and aerial lightness—were to the architects of this age masses of savagery, and the grotesque enormities of men in the dark ages. Inigo Jones had introduced the semi-classical style, and now Sir Christopher Wren and Vanbrugh arose to render it predominant.



Wren had the most extraordinary opportunity for distinguishing himself The fire of London had swept away a capital, and to him was assigned the task of restoring it, with all its streets and churches. Wren was descended from a clerical family. His father was chaplain-in-ordinary to Charles I. and dean of Westminster, and his uncle was bishop of Ely; and it was characteristic enough that Wren began his career under James II., by pulling down dissenters' chapels by royal order, before he tried his hand at erecting churches. He appears to have had no regular education for an architect, but he was even