Page:The Garden of Romance - 1897.djvu/136

124 sermons are offered to the world, though I shall admit but one out of the whole number of the so, so's, I shall, nevertheless, adventure to print the two moderatos without any sort of scruple.

What Yorick could mean by the words lentamente, tenutè, grave, and sometimes adagio, as applied to theological compositions, and with which he has characterised some of these sermons, I dare not venture to guess. I am more puzzled still upon finding a l'octavo alta! upon one; Con strepito upon the back of another; Scicilliana upon a third; Alla capella upon a fourth; Con l'arco upon this; Senza l'arco upon that. All I know is that they are musical terms, and have a meaning; and, as he was a musical man, I will make no doubt but that, by some quaint application of such metaphors to the compositions in hand, they impressed very distinct ideas of their several characters upon his fancy, whatever they may do upon that of others.

Amongst these there is that particular sermon which has unaccountably led me into this digression, the funeral sermon upon poor Le Fevre, wrote out very fairly, as if from a hasty copy. I take notice of it the more because it seems to have been his favourite composition. It is upon mortality, and is tied lengthways and crossways with a yarn thrum, and then rolled up and twisted round with a half-sheet of dirty blue paper, which seems to have been once the cast cover of a general review, which to this day smells horribly of horse-drugs. Whether these marks of humiliation were designed, I something doubt, because at the end of the sermon (and not at the beginning of it), very different from his way of treating the rest, he had wrote—Bravo!