many months of constant and unremitting practice to overcome
this natural defect of the vocal organ, and in some voices it is never
entirely conquered. An acute ear might often detect the faulty joining
of the voice, in both the Grisis, when executing a distant descending
interval. This obstacle meets the student at the very threshold of his
career; but we have met with many English taught amateurs, who were
altogether ignorant even of what was meant by joining the voice. In
fact, the art of singing, or of acquiring a mastery and control over the
voice, of remedying its defects, and developing its latent powers, is
comparatively unknown in England; our professors are for the most part
entirely ignorant of the capabilities of the human voice, as an
_instrument_, in the hands of the performer. Many of these observations
apply to our instrumental performers. With few exceptions, defective
training has, in this branch of the musical art, long prevented us from
producing performers of equal celebrity with those who have visited us
from the Continent. From them we have become acquainted with effects,
which we should have deemed the instruments on which they played wholly
incapable of producing. Our young professors now often follow these men
to their own country, there to learn of them that proficiency which they
would seek in vain to acquire at home.

In the midst of all this ignorance, with our one opera, our anthems,
madrigals, glees, and ballads, we nevertheless esteem ourselves a
musical people, and every one is ready to exclaim with Bottom, "I have a
reasonable good ear in musick!" Music certainly is the fashion now, and
no one would dare to avow that he had no music in his soul. It may be
thought, that none but a people passionately devoted to music, could
produce a succession of patriots ready to sacrifice health and wealth,
rather than their countrymen should fail to possess an Italian opera.
Some one is ever found equal to the emergency; there is seldom any lack
of competitors for the "forlorn hope" of the management of the Italian
opera, and, undismayed by the ruin of his predecessors, the highest
bidder rushes boldly on to the direction of the Queen's theatre. Forty
thousand pounds of debt has been known to have been incurred in a single
season; and it has been calculated that a sum little short of a million
sterling, besides the produce of the subscriptions and admissions, has
been sacrificed to the desire of an