urdy and bag-pipe squeal and
bellow and drone, which is meant for the music of the world. How far
sweeter was yours! This charming devil Sir Purcell had nursed from
childhood.

As a child, between a flighty mother and a father verging to insanity
from caprice, he had grown up with ideas of filial duty perplexed, and
with a fitful love for either, that was not attachment: a baffled natural
love, that in teaching us to brood on the hardness of our lot, lays the
foundation for a perniciously mystical self-love. He had waged
precociously philosophic, when still a junior. His father had kept him by
his side, giving him no profession beyond that of the obedient expectant
son and heir. His first allusion to the youth's dependency had provoked
their first breach, which had been widened by many an ostentatious
forgiveness on the one hand, and a dumbly-protesting submission on the
other. His mother died away from her husband's roof. The old man then
sought to obliterate her utterly. She left her boy a little money, and
the injunction of his father was, that he was never to touch it. He
inherited his taste for music from her, and his father vowed, that if
ever he laid hand upon a musical instrument again, he would be
disinherited. All these signs of a vehement spiteful antagonism to
reason, the young man might have treated more as his father's misfortune
than his own, if he could only have brought himself to acknowledge that
such a thing as madness stigmatized his family. But the sentimental mind
conceived it as 'monstrous impiety' to bring this accusation against a
parent who did not break windows, or grin to deformity. He behaved toward
him as to a reasonable person, and felt the rebellious rancour instead of
the pity. Thus sentiment came in the way of pity. By degrees, Sir Purcell
transferred all his father's madness to the Fates by whom he was
persecuted. There was evidently madness somewhere, as his shuddering
human nature told him. It did not offend his sentiment to charge this
upon the order of the universe.

Against such a wild-hitting madness, or concentrated ire of the superior
Powers, Sir Purcell stood up, taking blow upon blow. As organist of
Hillford Church, he brushed his garments, and put a polish on his
apparel, with an energetic humility that looked like unconquerable
patience; as though he had said: "While life is left in me, I will be
seen for what I am." We will vary it--"For what I think myself." In
reality,