delighting music.' Thus writes a pamphleteer of 1597. Doctor King, about the beginning of the last century, found the barbers degenerating in their accomplishments, and he assigns the cause: Turning themselves to periwig-making, they have forgot their cittern and their music.' The cittern twanged then in the barbers' shops in the fresh mornings especially; and then came forth the carman to bear his loads through the narrow thoroughfares. He also was musical. We all know how Falstaff describes Justice Shallow: He came ever in the rear-ward of the fashion, and sung those tunes to the over-scutched housewives that he heard the carmen whistle.' He had a large stock of tunes. In Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair,' one of the characters exclaims, ' If he meet but a carman in the street, and I find him not loth to keep him off of him, he will whistle him and all his tunes over at night in his sleep. Half a century later even, 'barbers, cobblers, and plowmen." were enumerated as 'the heirs of music.' Who does not perceive that when Isaac Walton's milkmaid sings,

'Come live with me and be my love,'

she is doing nothing remarkable? These charming words were the common possession of all. The people were the heirs of poetry as well as of music. They had their own delicious madrigals to sing, in which music was married to immortal verse, and they could sing them. Morley. writing in 1597, says, 'Supper being ended, and musicbooks, according to custom, being brought to the table, the mistress of the house presented me with a part, earnestly requesting me to sing; but when, after many excuses, protested unfeignedly that I could not, every one began to

wonder-yea, some whispered to others, demanding how I

was brought up.' In a condition of society like this, the street music must have been worth listening to.

"A noise

of musicians," as a little band was called, was to be found everywhere; and they attended upon the guests in taverns and ordinaries, and at good men's feasts' in private houses. In The Silent Woman,' it is said, 'The smell of the venison,

Cree

Tipes

The

going through the streets, will invite one noise of fiddlers or other;' and again, 'They have intelligence of all feasts; there's good correspondence betwixt them and the London cooks.' Feasts were then not mere occasions for gluttony and drunkenness, as they became in the next generation. As the drunkenness went on increasing, the taste for music went on diminishing. In the next century, the 'Tatler' writes, In Italy nothing is more frequent than to hear a cobbler working to an opera tune; but, on the contrary, our honest countrymen have so little an inclination to music, that they seldom begin to sing till they are drunk.' Thus we went on till the beginning of the present century, and indeed later. The street-music was an indication of the popular taste. Hogarth's blind hautboy-player, and his shrieking ballad-singer, are no caricatures. The execrable sounds which the lame and the blind produced were the mere arts of mendicancy. The principle of extorting money by hideous sounds was carried as far as it could go by a fellow of the name of Keeling, called Blind Jack, who performed on the flageolet with his nose. Every description of street exhibition was accompanied with these terrible noises. The vaulter, and the dancing lass, and the tumbler creeping through a hoop, and the puppet-showman, and the dancing dogs, and the bear and monkey, had each their own peculiar din, whether of drum, fiddle, horn, or bagpipes, compared with which the music of Morose's bearward and fencer would have been as the harmony of the spheres.

WHEN I was very young, and in the height of the opposi tion to my father, my mother wanted a large parcel bugles; for what use I forget. As they were then out fashion, she could get none. At last she was told of a quantity in a little shop in an obscure alley in the City. We drove thither; found a great stock; she bought it, and bade the proprietor send it home. He said, "Whither?" "To Sir Robert Walpole's." He asked, coolly, "Who is Dir Robert Walpole ?""*

What was Strawberry Hill?' might be a similar question with many persons, were we not living in a somewhat different age from that of Sir Robert Walpole. Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill is gone. Its place is being bccupied with trim villas, inhabited by a class of whose existence Walpole would have been as ignorant as the City

Horace Walpole to the Miss Berrys, March 5, 1791.

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shopkeeper was of the great Sir Robert. The maker of Strawberry Hill-the builder-up of its galleries, and tribunes, and Holbein-chambers-the arranger of its painted glass and gloom'-the collector of its pictures, and books, and bijouterie, says of himself, I am writing, I am building-both works that will outlast the memory of battles and heroes! Truly, I believe, the one will as much as t'other. My buildings are paper, like my writings, and both will be blown away in ten years after I am dead: if they had not the substantial use of amusing me while I live, they would be worth little indeed.'* Horace Walpole himself prevented the realisation of his own prophecy. It was said of him, even during his lifetime, that he had outlived three sets of his own battlements;' but he nevertheless contrived, by tying up his toy-warehouse and its moveables with entails and jointures through several generations, to keep the thing tolerably entire for nearly half a century after he had left that state of being where 'moth and dust do corrupt.' And though the paper portion of his works his Royal and Noble Authors,' his 'Anecdotes of Painting,' his Historic Doubts,' &c.--are formed of materials not much more durable than his battlements, he was during a long life scattering about the world an abundance of other paper fragments, that have not only lasted ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years after he was dead, but which aftertimes will not willingly let die. It was in Strawberry Hill that the every-day thoughts and experiences for the most part centred that have made the letters of Horace Walpole the best record of the manners of the upper ranks during half a century, when very great social changes were working all around. Strawberry Hill and Horace Walpole are inseparably associated in our minds. The house in Arlington Street, from which he sometimes dates, is like most other Westend houses, a thing distinguished only by its number; and which has no more abiding associations than the

* Horace Walpole to Conway, August 5, 1761.

chariot which rolled on from its first drawing-room through the necessary decay of cracked varnish and split panels, until its steps displayed the nakedness of their original iron, and the dirty rag that was once a carpet was finally succeeded by the luxury of clean straw once a week. We cannot couceive Horace Walpole in a house with three windows upon a floor, in a formal row of ugly brick brethren. It is in Strawberry Hill, in the little parlour hung with a stone colour Gothic paper, and Jackson's Venetian prints or in the charming closet hung with green paper, and water-colour pictures'-or in 'the room where we always live, hung with a blue and white paper in stripes, adorned with festoons'-that we fancy him writing to Montagu, Mann, Chute, and Conway, in the days when we pique ourselves upon nothing but simplicity,' and Lady Townshend exclaimed of the house, 'It is just such a house as a parson's, where the children lie at the foot of the bed.' In a few years the owner had visions of galleries, and round towers, and cloisters, and chapels: and then the house became filled with kingly armour, and rare pictures, and cabinets of miniatures by Oliver and Petitot, and Raffaelle china. Then, when Strawberry Hill came to the height of its glory, the owner kept an inn. the sign the Gothic Castle,' and his whole time was passed in giving tickets for seeing it, and hiding himself while it was seen.* Lastly came the time when the old man was laid up for weeks with the gout, and the building and curiosity-buying was at an end; and after the Duchess of York had come to see his house in 1793, when he put a carpet on the step of his gate, and matted his court, and presented chocolate upon a salver, he says, here will end my connexions with courts, beginning with George the First, great-great-great-grandfather to the Duchess of York! It sounds as if there could not have been above three generations more before Adam.' There ace so associated with the memory of one ry Hill is with Horace Walpole.

never was a

man as

nce Walpole to Montagu, Sept. 3, 1763.

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