of the
Enraged Musician becomes my paradise.

I have sat at an Oratorio (that profanation of the purposes of the
cheerful playhouse) watching the faces of the auditory in the pit
(what a contrast to Hogarth's Laughing Audience!) immoveable, or
affecting some faint emotion,--till (as some have said, that our
occupations in the next world will be but a shadow of what delighted
us in this) I have imagined myself in some cold Theatre in Hades,
where some of the _forms_ of the earthly one should be kept up, with
none of the _enjoyment_; or like that--

--Party in a parlour,
All silent, and all DAMNED!

Above all, those insufferable concertos, and pieces of music, as
they are called, do plague and embitter my apprehension.--Words are
something; but to be exposed to an endless battery of mere sounds; to
be long a dying, to lie stretched upon a rack of roses; to keep up
languor by unintermitted effort; to pile honey upon sugar, and sugar
upon honey, to an interminable tedious sweetness; to fill up sound
with feeling, and strain ideas to keep pace with it; to gaze on empty
frames, and be forced to make the pictures for yourself; to read a
book, _all stops_, and be obliged to supply the verbal matter; to
invent extempore tragedies to answer to the vague gestures of an
inexplicable rambling mime--these are faint shadows of what I have
undergone from a series of the ablest-executed pieces of this empty
_instrumental music_.

I deny not, that in the opening of a concert, I have experienced
something vastly lulling and agreeable:--afterwards followeth the
languor, and the oppression. Like that disappointing book in Patmos;
or, like the comings on of melancholy, described by Burton, doth
music make her first insinuating approaches:--"Most pleasant it is
to such as are melancholy given, to walk alone in some solitary
grove, betwixt wood and water, by some brook side, and to meditate
upon some delightsome and pleasant subject, which shall affect him
most, _amabilis insania_, and _mentis gratissimus error_. A most
incomparable delight to build castles in the air, to go smiling to
themselves, acting an infinite variety of parts, which they suppose,
and strongly imagine, they act, or that they see done.--So delightsome
these toys at first, they could spend whole days and nights without
sleep, even whole years in such contemplations, and fantastical
meditations, which are like so many dreams, and will hardly be drawn
from them--w