This reminds us slightly of Barrow's far more comprehensive and accurate analysis:

'It is, in short, a manner of speaking out of the simple and plain way (such as reason teacheth and proveth things by), which by a pretty surprizing uncouthness in conceit or expression doth affect and amuse the fancy, stirring in it some wonder, and breeding some delight thereto. It raiseth admiration as signifying a nimble sagacity of apprehension, a special felicity of invention, a vivacity of spirit and reach of wit more than vulgar, it seeming to argue a rare quickness of parts, that one can fetch in remote conceits applicable; a notable skill that he can dexterously accommodate them to the purpose before him, together with a lively briskness of humour, not apt to damp those sportful flashes of imagination.-Sermon Foolish Talking and Jesting.

on

The extracts from the translation of Hudibras into Latin, French, and German, given in the supplemental notes, are well worth consulting. In these we see how much of the humour and spirit of the original may be transferred to a foreign language, and how much evaporates in the process. Of all these versions Voltaire's is by far the worst. He was not content to render his author literally, but must needs, with characteristic vanity, introduce images and ideas of his own, which, it is needless to say, do not harmonize at all with those of Butler. The translation of the Sieur Jean Townley, Chevalier de l'Ordre Militaire de St. Louis, an Englishman by birth, but employed in the French service, being probably by his religion debarred from serving his own country, is remarkable for the felicity with which the difficulty of rendering Butler's idiomatic English into French is overcome. The opening lines will enable the reader to judge of their comparative merits. Voltaire's begins

Quand les profanes et les saints
Dans l'Angleterre étaient aux prises;
Qu'on se battaient pour des églises
Aussi fort que pour des catins;
Lorsq'Anglicans et puritains
Faisaient une si rude guerre,
Et qu'au sortir du cabaret
Les orateurs de Nazareth
Allaient battre la caisse en chaire;
Que partout, sans savoir pourquoi,
Au nom du ciel, au nom du roi,

Les gens d'armes couvraient la terre,
Alors Monsieur le chevalier,
Long-temps oisif, ainsi qu'Achille,
Tout rempli d'une sainte bile,
Suivi de son grand écuyer,
S'échappa de son poulailler,
Avec son sabre et l'Evangile,
Et s'avisa de guerroyer.

After this miserable attempt, Townley appears to great advantage.

Quand les hommes en desarroi

Se brouilloient sans sçavoir pourquoi ;
Quand gros mots, craintes, jalousies
Causoient partout des batteries,
Et les gens en dissension
Pour la Dame Religion,
Se chamailloient dans la dispute
Comme gens ivres font pour pute,
Dont chacun disoit tant de bien,
Sans que personne y connût rien ;
Quand la Trompette d'Evangile
Sonnoit la charge par la Ville;
Et pour tambour, la Chaire au loin
Retentissoit à coups de poing.

This is a faithful translation, and conveys much of the spirit of the original; but the last couplet cannot attain to the humour of— When pulpit, drum ecclesiastic, Was beat with fist instead of a stick.

We have referred to various parts of Mr. Townley's volume, which is very scarce; and we find that throughout there is no attempt to imitate the burlesque rhymes of Butler.

This element of humour is ob tained with more ease in the Latin version, because rhyme itself in Latin strikes the ear as barbarous, an effect which is heightened by the false quantities occurring in the rhyming syllables. The following will remind the reader of Father Prout:

Cum arsit civica phrenesis
Pacis hominibus pertæsis,
Nec cuiquam nota fuit causa
Tam dira quæ produxit ausa,
Cum tristes iræ et furores
Multum elicerent cruoris,
Et velut qui sunt mente capti
Præ mero ire parum apti.
Sic hi pugnabant, dum pro more
Religio quisque est in ore;

*

*

*

Tam parva fuit differentia, Vix et ne vix vicit prudentia. Before dismissing this most complete edition of Butler's Poetical Works, we cannot help noticing the vast improvement upon the text of all previous issues which has been effected by the editor. It is necessary for the metre to elide many vowels; but apparently from the fear of interfering with these essential variations from common practice, previous editions have retained the obsolete mode of spelling practised in Butler's time, and many marks of elision which were wholly unnecessary. These deformed the page, and made it extremely difficult to read Butler. The present editor has

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modernized the spelling, and retained only those marks of elision which are absolutely necessary for the metre. To this may be added, that the text which received Butler's latest corrections has been adopted, the earlier readings being exhibited in the foot-notes, whenever they call for special notice. Upon the whole, whether we regard these volumes on their intrinsic merits, or consider them as forming part of the Annotated Edition of the English Poets, there can be no doubt that Mr. Bell is successfully grappling with a task which might well fill the mind of a literary man of the highest attainments with appre

hension.

to be commended neither for its abundance nor its excellence. And possibly this remark may admit of a wider application; since the same difficulty must attend all art history and criticism, in the fact of its being addressed to two very different classes of persons-the student and the general reader,to both of whom it is next to impossible that the same matter and the same manner should ever be perfectly acceptable. From whatever cause, however, writers about music have contended with this difficulty with the least success, and indeed may be said to have exhibited, in the contest, a special proneness for falling between two stools to the ground.' Useless to the student from its want of technical exactness, musical history or criticism is too often distasteful also to the general reader from the absence of that literary charm in the vain struggle after which technical exactness has been lost.

Take the case of Dr. Burney's History of Music, four volumes, quarto; contained in which is a mass of facts, the collection and collation of which were the work of a long and laborious life. The author, besides being a musician of decent

gentleman, one who kept company with Dr. Johnson, Burke, Warton, Reynolds, and Topham Beauclerc. The work is of course a valuable one. Facts are facts: and we are grateful to him who puts them before us, in proportion to their importance or the labour which has been undergone in getting them together. But Dr. Burney was tormented with a craving to write a 'readable' book; to address himself not only to the student, but to the general reader. With a pardonable ambition to be held

sesto tra cotanto senno, he addressed his book not so much to those by whom it was most wanted, and to whom it ought to have been most useful, but to his personal friends,-men, one and all, who would have blackballed Orpheus himself, had he been proposed as a member of the club.' The probabilities are, that not one of the persons Burney most wished to please ever read half a-dozen of the pages, which for their sakes he had striven to render 'readable' by 'classical allusion,' elegant disquisition,' and 'strokes of humour,'-in other words, inapposite quotation, tiresome digression, and very dull jokes.

By Edward J. Hopkins and

Over hill, over dale,

Thorough bush, thorough briar,

without a word of apology for the roughness of the road; pausing never till he has reached his destination, be it where it may. Even in these short-breathed days we believe that Hawkins's work is not infrequently read through. We doubt whether anybody ever did, or ever will, read through Burney's. Of easy writing, fresh, and in small quantities, we can and must, all of us, swallow our portion; but four volumes quarto, enlivened with strokes of humour three quarters of a century old, are practically the hardest of all reading; and save for the really valuable information thus fantastically presented, would be unbearable, even in instalments.

We have before us a work much more after the model of Hawkins than of Burney; a book without a line of fine writing in it; abounding in information sometimes curious and always valuable, put before us in a simple straightforward manner, by two writers who have little in common save the important qualification of thorough knowledge of their subject. The Organ; its History and Construction, is an honest book, and therefore a readable book-readable not only to the musical student who has a purpose in ascertaining what it contains, but readable to anyone for whom successful research and lucid explanation, in connexion with a subject of general interest, have any charm. For the organ is not brought before us in the pages of Dr. Rimbault and Mr. Hopkins in its poetical or picturesque aspect; they leave its æsthetical influences where they found them, and abstain from all allusion to the dominion of the king of instruments over the

heart of man. The organ with them is, for the time being, not so much the most noble,' as 'the most ingenious and complex of musical instruments.'

Lest the bulk of 'The Organ'symbolizing as it does, in this respect, the instrument of which it treats-should intimidate those who would attack a cube of smaller dimensions more courageously, it is right to say that the volume before us is not one book, but three-a trilogy, the two first parts of which have no other connexion than a common subject; while the third consists rather of matter supplementary to the second, and intended for reference, not consecutive reading. Indeed we see no particular reason why Dr. Rimbault's history and Mr. Hopkins's treatise should have been sent forth to the world in the same wrapper, seeing that they are books written with independent views and purposes, the modes of presenting and furthering which neither have nor demand anything in common. We shall deal with them therefore separately and successively, following the order in which they come before us in the volume.

Dr. Rimbault divides the history of the organ into periods or 'epochs;' the first being occupied by the ancient organ, anterior to the invention of the key-board; the second, by 'the mediaval organ, after the invention of the key-board; the third, by the first organ-builders by profession; and the fourth, by the founders of modern organ-building.' A fifth epoch, contemporary organs and organ building, would be matter for description rather than history, and belongs therefore to the department of Mr. Hopkins.

Dr. Rimbault opens his Historical Account with a definition.

The word organ, used in the Old Testament and in the Psalms, was taken from the Greek translation; but the ancient Greeks had no particular instrument called an organ;" representing by ôpyavov, like the Romans by organum, not an organ, in our sense of the term, but an instrument of any kind; applying the expression, however, more particularly to musical instruments.'

The organ (ougab) mentioned in

Genesis, ch. iv. 21, certainly little resembled the modern instrument of that name, although it may be regarded as furnishing the first hint. It was probably a series of reeds of unequal length and thickness joined together; being nearly identical with the pipe of Pan among the Greeks, or that simple instrument called a mouth-organ, which is still in common use.'

The development of this toy into such vast and complicated structures as the organs of Haarlem, Freiburg, or Birmingham, is hardly to be paralleled in the history of inventions. The process of development was, as might be expected, a slow one. Those of our readers who have ever assisted at one of those instructive and venerable entertainments of which the hero is Mr. Punch-the Don Giovanni of the people-or at the now rarer exhibition of Fantocini, will have noticed the mode of operation of the functionary who does duty for an orchestra. His principal instrument is the very pipe of Pan under consideration, the conditions of performance on which are, that each particular reed must be brought exactly under the lip as the note which it produces is called into requisition. Now the hands of the functionary in question being already full-devoted to the performance of a bass, of which the characteristic is rather intensity than variety or justness of intonation-there remain no means at his disposal of moving the mouthorgan in the manner described as requisite to the production of melody. The organ is therefore made a fixture, and the mouth ranges over the reeds, puffing its little jet of air into this or that one as it passes; the performer meanwhile having the air of a man engaged in gesticulating incessantly very decided dissent or refusal. The mountain wont go to Mahomet, so Mahomet must go to the mountain. The organ or the mouth must move perpetually during perfor

mance.

To obviate the fatiguing motion of the head or hands, by inflating the pipes in some other manner, men seem to have laboured for centuries. The first step towards this end was the invention of a wooden box, the top of which was

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bored with just so many holes as there were pipes to stand on it. In these they now placed the pipes in the same order as they occupied in the Pan-pipes. From the chest (the modern wind chest) proceeded a small reed (now the wind trunk), into which they blew with the mouth. But as, by this means all the pipes spoke simultaneously, they were obliged to stop with the fingers the tops of those pipes intended to be silent-a process which was soon found to be very troublesome, and, as the number of pipes increased, impossible. Now, in order to prevent the simultaneous intonation of all the pipes, a slider (now called the valve) was placed under the aperture of each pipe, which either opened or stopped the entrance of the wind into the pipes. The slides stood in an inclined position, and in order to open them levers were added, which were connected with the slides by cords or strings (the origin of the pull-downs). A further increase of the number of pipes at length caused an enlargement of the pipe-chest (the modern wind chest); consequently human breath was no longer sufficient to supply the instrument, and then a more suitable contrivance for the production of wind was devised. Thus we have a new class of instrument, called by the Greeks ὄργανον πνευματικόν, and by the Romans, tibia utricularis.

These terms, however, by Dr. Rimbault's own showing, refer to instruments of very different construction and powers.

When soberly considered, the tibia utricularis appears to be nothing more than the origin of the bagpipe. It consisted of pipes pierced with lateral holes, and an inflating pipe, which the performer applied to his mouth to fill the leathern bag with wind. The application of the inflating tube, it is evident, related only to the smaller instruments, such as that described by Virgil; the larger ones were supplied with wind by the compression of the leathern bag or bellows. This contrivance proved of so much advantage to the improving instrument, that, in order to obtain a more powerful tone, a second row of pipes of the same pitch was added to the former. The pipes having been thus increased and enlarged, and the box widened, the next improvement was the enlargement of the wind-tube (trunk). It now became evident that the leathern bag was insufficient to supply the proper quantity of wind required. The want of wind thus occasioned by the enlargement of the instrument was remedied by the invention of bellows, yielding a continuous supply to the leathern bag, which, from this time, served the office of our modern

We

wind chest. From the progressive inventions we have recorded, it will be observed that many portions of the modern organ were already to be met with in the instruments of the ancients in a more or less complete state. may therefore justly assign the invention of the organ to this period, though no precise date can be given; thus much only can be stated with certainty, that all these inventions date from a period

before the birth of Christ.

Dr. Rimbault devotes a chapter to the consideration of the hydraulic organ, in relation to which a passage in the Architectura of Vitruvius has much puzzled the learned,' whose state of bewilderment seems likely to prove chronic. 'The mechanical operation of the waterorgan is scarcely intelligible,' even when Vitruvius is helped out by comparison with, or commentary of, writers so various and so remote as Claudian, Atheneus, Tertullian, William of Malmesbury, or Publilius Optatianus, the author of a poem descriptive of the instrument,

composed of verses so constructed as to show both the lower part which contained the bellows, the wind chest which lay upon it, and over this the row of twenty-six pipes. The latter are represented by twenty-six lines, which increase in length each by one letter, until the last line is twice as long as the first!' The contest for supremacy between verbal and pictorial representation should have ended in this poem, like that of the White and Red Roses in the person of Henry VII.

The hydraulic organ, whatever may have been the peculiarities of its mechanism, certainly attained no permanent success. The celebrated enigmatical epigram,' attributed to the Emperor Julian (written about the middle of the fourth century), has reference evidently to the pneumatic organ. From it we learn that the instrument was still unprovided with a clavier, or keyboard, and that the bellows were made of bull's hide.'

'The organ was early used in the service of the church,' according to some authorities as early as the beginning of the fifth century, or at the latest in the middle of the seventh. Its general adoption in the churches of Europe seems to have been due to Pepin, the father

of Charlemagne, who, in reply to an application to the Byzantine Emperor Constantine Cophronymus, in or about the year 757, received one from the East, which was placed in the church of St. Corneille at Compiègne, a favourite residence, down to a recent period, of the kings of France. Nor do the obligations of the Western Church to Oriental potentates end here. There is little doubt that the organ, 'which Walafrid Strabo described as existing in the ninth century in a church at Aix-la-Chapelle,' was a present to Charlemagne from no less interesting a personage than the Caliph Haroun Alraschid; of which instrument the maker was 'an Arabian named Giafer'-whether the vizier so dear to the readers of Arabian Nights, Dr. Rimbault does not tell us. These instruments so stimulated the ingenuity of French and German artists, that an organ and a master to instruct Italian workmen were solicited of a Cisalpine bishop by Pope John VIII. 'Soon afterwards we find organs in common use in England, constructed by English artists, with pipes of copper, fixed in gilt frames. These instruments however, it is evident, notwithstanding the grandiloquent descriptions of contemporary writers, were of the rudest description. The key-board was not yet invented; and the compass probably rarely exceeded ten notes, although (as we have seen) the art of increasing the intensity of each note by additional pipes had been long practised.

Notwithstanding the imperfections of these instruments (says Dr. Rimbault), they everywhere produced the greatest astonishment, and the churches were desirous of possessing so efficacious a means of attracting a congregation. We therefore find, in this century (the tenth), that organs multiplied not only in the cathedral churches of the episcopal seats, but also in many churches and monastic establishments.

The history of the organ proper begins at the close of the eleventh century, up to which period it was a wind instrument of greater power and of more imposing quality than any other in use, but unprovided with any of those peculiar contrivances by which the simplest modern instrument becomes, under the hand of a