thanked--may very possibly lay the blame of their fickleness upon it,
and bring a host of witnesses into court to testify to their general
good behaviour--their calmness, and amenity, and inoffensiveness, till
exposed to the evil influence of AEolus's unruly troop--the most
wholesale agitators going, and never so happy as when raising a riot.

N.B.--The whole tribe of zephyrs, gentle airs, and evening and morning
breezes, will please to consider themselves as _not_ included under the
term _wind_; to which alone, in its common-place hectoring style, this
tirade is meant to apply.

(We hate any thing important being popped within a parenthesis, but as
the literary sin pinches us less than the immorality, we must here state
what truth requires us to say--that the above, being written during a
fit of the spleen, induced by the hubbub of winds and waters adverted
to, must be received by the candid reader with considerable allowance.)

So much for the wind, which has blown _music_ completely out of our head
for a while. What a pity we did not bethink us of placing our AEolian
harp in the window, before it had sunk into those short angry gusts
which are now alone heard--the mere dregs of the gale; and so have drawn
our inspiration from that which puffed it out! But, somehow or other,
our bright thoughts generally present themselves too late to be of any
use; and this is one in that predicament!

Some people profess to be never tired of music, but to enjoy it _a
l'outrance_, at all times and in all places. With such, we must own, we
have no sympathy. With all our _love_--not mere liking--for the art, we
still hold that it is indebted for its charm to the categories of time
and place, at least as much as its neighbours; for (but this confession
should be made in the smallest, most modest-looking type in the world)
there are both times and places when we hate it cordially, and fervently
wish that neither harmony, nor its ancestor, melody, had ever been
invented. In some such mood as made the very heavens themselves odious
and pestilential to Hamlet, does music appear to us as unlike itself, as
they really were to his crazed imagination of them; and we look forward
with malicious pleasure to the time when, if Dryden is to be
believed--but your poets are not always prophets--"music shall untune
the sky," as a period when all the miseries it has inflicted on us shall
be amply revenged by its perpetrating, or assisting at, this gi