The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and
Instruction, by Various

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Title: The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction
Vol. 12, Issue 330, September 6, 1828

Author: Various

Release Date: March 1, 2004 [EBook #11389]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE MIRROR OF LITERATURE, AMUSEMENT, AND INSTRUCTION.

VOL. 12, No. 330.] SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1828. [PRICE 2d.

WHY ARE NOT THE ENGLISH A MUSICAL PEOPLE?

We cannot help it.--_Massinger's Roman Actor._

Astronomy, music, and architecture, are the floating topics of the day;
on the second of these heads we have thrown together a few hints, which
may, probably prove entertaining to our readers.

The English are not--you know, reflective public--a musical people; this
has been said over and over again in the musical and dramatic critiques
of the newspapers. True it is that we have no _national music_, like our
neighbours the Welsh, the Irish, or the Scotch; for our music, like out
language, is a mere _riccifamento_, stolen from every nation in Europe.
But our king (God bless him) is an excellent musician, and plays the
violoncello most delightfully; and we have an Academy of Music. Then we
have an Italian Theatre that burns the feet and fingers of all who
meddle with its management--witness, Mr. Ebers, who, by being "married"
to sweet sounds, lost the enormous sum of 47,000_l_.--it must be owned,
an unfortunate match, or as Dr. Franklin would have said, "paying rather
too dear for his whistle." We have too an _English Opera House_, where
scarcely any but _foreign_ music is heard, and which, to the
ever-lasting credit of its management, has transplanted from the warm
climes of the south to our ungenial atmosphere, some of the finest
compositions in the continental schools of modern music. Success has,
however, attended most of their enterprises; for the taste of the
English for foreign music is by no means a modern mania. From Pepys's
_Diary_ we