amous a violinist as Boccherini was a violoncellist, there is
in his string quartets no trace of that tendency to sacrifice the
ensemble to an exhibition of his own playing which in Boccherini's
chamber music puts the violoncello into the same position as the first
violin in the chamber music of Spohr. In Dittersdorf's quartets (at
least six of which are worthy of their survival at the present day) the
first violin leads indeed, but not more than is inevitable in such
unsophisticated music where the normal place for melody is at the top.
The appearance of greater vitality in the texture of Boccherini's
quintets is produced merely by the fact that, his special instrument
being the violoncello, his displays of brilliance inevitably occur in
the inner parts. Six of Dittersdorf's symphonies on the _Metamorphoses_
of Ovid were republished in 1899, the centenary of his death. In them we
have an amusing and sometimes charming illustration of the way in which
at transitional periods music, as at the present day, is ready to make
crutches of literature. The end of the representation of the conversion
of the Lycian peasants into frogs is prophetically and ridiculously
Wagnerian in its ingenious expansion of rhythm and eminently expert
orchestration. Every external feature of Dittersdorf's style seems
admirably apt for success in German comic opera on a small scale; and an
occasional experimental performance at the present day of his _Doktor
und Apotheker_ is not less his due than the survival of his best
quartets.

See his _Lebensbeschreibung_, published at Leipzig, 1801 (English
translation by A. D. Coleridge, 1896); an article in the _Rivista
musicale_, vi. 727; and the article "Dittersdorf" in Grove's
_Dictionary of Music and Musicians_.

DITTO (from the Lat. _dictum_, something said, Ital. _detto_,
aforesaid), that which has been said before, the same thing. The word is
frequently abbreviated into "do." In accounts, "ditto" is indicated by
two dots or a dash under the word or figure that would otherwise be
repeated. A "suit of dittos," a trade or slang phrase, is a suit in
which coat, trousers and waistcoat are all of the same material.

DITTON, HUMPHRY (1675-1715), English mathematician, was born at
Salisbury on the 29th of May 1675. He studied theology, and was for some
years a dissenting minister at Tonbridge, but on the death of his father
he devoted himself to the congenial study of mathematics. Thr