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All Valentines are not foolish; and I shall not easily forget thine, my kind friend (if I may have leave to call you so) E. B.-E. B. lived opposite a young maiden, whom he had often seen, unseen, from his parlour window in C-e Street. She was all joyousness and innocence, and just of an age to enjoy receiving a Valentine, and just of a temper to bear the disappointment of missing one with good humour. E. B. is an artist of no common powers; in the fancy parts of designing, perhaps inferior to none; his name is known at the bottom of many a well-executed vignette in the way of his profession, but no farther; for E. B. is modest, and the world meets nobody half-way. E. B. meditated how he could repay this young maiden for many a favour which she had done him unknown; for when a kindly face greets us, though but passing by, and never knows us again, nor we it, we should feel it as an obligation; and E. B. did. This good artist set himself at work to please the damsel. was just before Valentine's day three years since. He wrought, unseen, and unsuspected, a wondrous work. We need not say it was on the finest gilt paper, with borders-full, not of common hearts and heartless allegory, but all the prettiest stories of love from Ovid and older poets than Ovid (for E. B. is a scholar). There was Pyramus and Thisbe, and be sure Dido was not forgot, nor Hero and Leander, and swans more than sang in Cayster, with mottoes and fanciful devices, such as beseemed-a work in short of magic. Iris dipt the woof. This on Valentine's eve he commended to the all-swallowing indiscriminate orifice-(O ignoble trust!) of the common post; but the humble medium did its duty, and from his watchful stand, the next morning, he saw the cheerful messenger knock, and by-and-by the precious charge delivered. He saw, unseen, the happy girl unfold the Valentine, dance about, clap her hands, as one after one the pretty emblems unfolded themselves. She danced about, not with light love or foolish expectations, for she had no lover: or, if she had, none she knew that could have created those bright images which delighted her. It was more like some fairy present; a God-send, as our familiarly pious ancestors termed a benefit received, where the benefactor was unknown. It would do her no harm. It would do her good for ever after. It is good to love the unknown. I only give this as a specimen of E. B. and his modest way of doing a concealed kindness.

"

Good-morrow to my Valentine," sings poor Ophelia; and no better wish, but with better auspices, we wish to all faithful lovers, who are not too wise to despise old legends, but are content to rank themselves humble diocesans of old Bishop Valentine, and his true church.

A Chapter on Ears.

(The London Magazine, March, 1821.)

[The Essayist's "good Catholic friend Nov," was no other than Vincent Novello, the eminent organist and composer.]

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Mistake me not, reader, nor imagine that I am by nature destitute of those exterior twin appendages, hanging ornaments and (architecturally speaking)

handsome volutes to the human capital. Better my mother had never borne me.-I am, I think, rather delicately than copiously provided with those conduits; and I feel no disposition to envy the mule for his plenty, or the mole for her exactness, in those ingenious labyrinthine inlets - those indispensable sideintelligencers.

Neither have I incurred or done anything to incur, with Defoe, that hideous disfigurement, which constrained him to draw upon assurance-to feel " quite unabashed," and at ease upon that article. I was never, I thank my stars, in the pillory; nor, if I read them aright, is it within the compass of my destiny that I ever should be.

When therefore I say that I have no ear, you will understand me to mean -for music.-To say that this heart never melted at the concourse of sweet sounds, would be a foul self-libel. Water parted from the sea never fails to move it strangely. So does “In infancy.' But they were used to be sung at her harpsichord (the old-fashioned instrument in vogue in those days) by a gentlewoman-the gentlest, sure, that ever merited the appellation-the sweetest -why should I hesitate to name Mrs. S―, once the blooming Fanny Weatheral of the Temple-who had power to thrill the soul of Elia, small imp as he was, even in his long coats; and to make him glow, tremble, and blush with a passion, that not faintly indicated the day-spring of that absorbing sentiment, which was afterwards destined to overwhelm and subdue his nature quite, for Alice W-n.

I even think that sentimentally I am disposed to harmony. But organically am incapable of a tune. I have been practising "God save the King" all my life; whistling and humming it over to myself in solitary corners; and am not yet arrived, they tell me, within many quavers of it. Yet hath the loyalty of Elia never been impeached.

I am not without suspicion that I have an undeveloped faculty of music within me. For, thrumming, in my wild way, on my friend A.'s piano, the other morning, while he was engaged in an adjoining parlour,-on his return he was pleased to say, "he thought it could not be the maid!" On his first surprise at hearing the keys touched in somewhat an airy and masterful way, not dreaming of me, his suspicions had lighted on Jenny. But a grace snatched from a superior refinement, soon convinced him that some being,technically perhaps deficient, but higher informed from a principle common to all the fine arts, --had swayed the keys to a mood which Jenny, with all her (less-cultivated) enthusiasm, could never have elicited from them. I mention this as a proof of my friend's penetration, and not with any view of disparaging Jenny.

Scientifically I could never be made to understand (yet have I taken some pains) what a note in music is; or how one note should differ from another. Much less in voices can I distinguish a soprano from a tenor. Only sometimes the thorough bass I contrive to guess at, from its being supereminently harsh and disagreeable. I tremble, however, for my misapplication of the simplest terms of that which I disclaim. While I profess my ignorance, I scarce know what to say I am ignorant of. I hate, perhaps, by misnomers. Sostenuto and adagio stand in the like relation of obscurity to me; and Sol, Fa, Mi, Re, is as conjuring as Baralipton.

It is hard to stand alone-in an age like this, - (constituted to the quick and critical perception of all harmonious combinations, I verily believe, beyond all preceding ages, since Jubal stumbled upon the gamut) - to remain as it were singly unimpressible to the magic influences of an art which is said to have such an especial stroke at soothing, elevating, and refining the passions.-Yet rather than break the candid current of my confessions, I must avow to you,

* [Earless on high stood, unabashed, Defoe.-Dunciad.]

that I have received a great deal more pain than pleasure from this so cried-up faculty.

I am constitutionally susceptible of noises. A carpenter's hammer, in a warm summer noon, will fret me into more than midsummer madness. But those unconnected, unset sounds are nothing to the measured malice of music. The ear is passive to those single strokes; willingly enduring stripes, while it hath no task to con. To music it cannot be passive. It will strive-mine at least will-spite of its inaptitude, to thrid the maze; like an unskilled eye painfully poring upon hieroglyphics. I have sat through an Italian Opera, till, for sheer pain, and inexplicable anguish, I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded streets, to solace myself with sounds, which I was not obliged to follow, and get rid of the distracting torment of endless, fruitless, barren attention! I take refuge in the unpretending assemblage of honest commonlife sounds;-and the purgatory 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 !) immovable, 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 langour 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 effect 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-winding and unwinding themselves as so many clocks, and still pleasing their humours, until at last the SCENE TURNS UPON A SUDDEN, and they being now habitated to such meditations and solitary places, can endure no company, can think of nothing but harsh and distasteful subject. Fear, sorrow, suspicion, subrusticus pudor, discontent, cares, and weariness of life,

* [Rev. chap. x. ver. 10.]

surprise them on a sudden, and they can think of nothing else: continually suspecting, no sooner are their eyes open, but this infernal plague of melancholy seizeth upon them, and terrifies their souls, representing some dismal object to their minds; which now, by no means, no labour, no persuasions, they can avoid, they cannot be rid of, they cannot resist."

Something like this "SCENE-TURNING I have experienced at the evening parties, at the house of my good Catholic friend Nov; who, by the aid of a capital organ, himself the most finished of players, converts his drawing-room into a chapel, his week days into Sundays, and these latter into minor heavens.t

When my friend commences upon one of those solemn anthems, which peradventure struck upon my heedless ear, rambling in the side aisles of the dim abbey, some five-and-thirty years since, waking a new sense, and putting a soul of old religion into my young apprehension--(whether it be that, in which the psalmist, weary of the persecutions of bad men, wisheth to himself dove's wings, or that other, which, with a like measure of sobriety and pathos, inquireth by what means the young man shall best cleanse his mind) - a holy calm pervadeth me.-I am for the time

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But when this master of the spell, not content to have laid a soul prostrate, goes on, in his power, to inflict more bliss than lies in her capacity to receive, —impatient to overcome her "earthly" with his "heavenly,"--still pouring in, for protracted hours, fresh waves and fresh from the sea of sound, or from that inexhausted German ocean, above which, in triumphant progress, dolphinseated, ride those Arions Haydn and Mozart, with their attendant tritons Bach, Beethoven, and a countless tribe, whom to attempt to reckon up would but plunge me again in the deeps, ---I stagger under the weight of harmony, reeling to and fro at my wit's end;-clouds, as of frankincense, oppress me-priests, altars, censers, dazzle before me-the genius of his religion hath me in her toils-a shadowy triple tiara invests the brow of my friend, late so naked, so ingenious--he is Pope, -and by him sits, like as in the anomaly of dreams, a she-Pope too,-tri-coroneted like himself!-I am converted, and yet a Protestant;-at once malleus hereticorum, and myself grand heresiarch: or three heresies centre in my person: I am Marcion, Ebion, and Cerinthus-Gog and Magog-what not?-till the coming in of the friendly supper tray dissipates the figment, and a draught of true Lutheran beer (in which chiefly my friend shows himself no bigot) at once reconciles me to the rationalities of a purer faith; and restores to me the genuine unterrifying aspects of my pleasantcountenanced host and hostess.

"

[P.S. A writer, whose real name it seems is Boldero, but who has been entertaining the town for the last twelve months with some very pleasant lucubrations under the assumed signature of Leigh Hunt, in his Indicator" of the 31st January last has thought fit to insinuate that I, Elia, do not write the little sketches which bear my signature in this magazine, but that the true author of them is a Mr. L-b. Observe the critical period at which he has chosen to impute the calumny, -on the very eve of the publication of our last number,-affording no scope for explanation for a full month; during which time I must lie writhing and tossing under the cruel imputation of nonentity. Good Heavens! that a plain man must not be allowed to be

[Anatomy of Melancholy.]

[I have been there, and still would go;

"Tis like a little heaven below.-Dr. Watts,]

[Clearly a fictitious appellation; for, if we admit the latter of these names to be in a manner English, what is Leigh? Christian nomenclature knows no such.]

They call this an age of personality; but surely this spirit of anti-personality (if I may so express it) is something worse.

Take away my moral_reputation,-I may live to discredit that calumny; injure my literary fame-I may write that up again; but, when a gentleman is robbed of his identity, where is he?

Other murderers stab but at our existence, a frail and perishing trifle at the best; but here is an assassin who aims at our very essence; who not only forbids us to be any longer, but to have been at all. Let our ancestors look

to it.

Is the parish register nothing? Is the house in Princes Street, Cavendish Square, where we saw the light six-and-forty years ago, nothing? Were our progenitors from stately Genoa, where we flourished four centuries back, before the barbarous name of Boldero was known to a European mouth, nothing? Was the goodly scion of our name, transplanted into England in the reign of the seventh Henry, nothing? Are the archives of the steelyard, in succeeding reigns (if haply they survive the fury of our envious enemies), showing that we flourished in prime repute, as merchants, down to the period of the Commonwealth, nothing?

Why, then the world, and all that's in't, is nothing;
The covering sky is nothing; Bohemia nothing.

I am ashamed that this trifling writer should have power to move me so.]

All Fools' Day.

(The London Magazine, April, 1821.)

[There was appended to this essay, as it originally appeared, the date "1st April, 1821," as if in scrupulous authentication. "Honest R. meant the old bookseller Ramsay of the London Library on Ludgate Hill: while " Granville S." was Granville Sharp.]

THE Compliments of the season to my worthy masters, and a merry first of April to us all!

I am

Many happy returns of this day to you-and you-and you, sir,-nay, never frown, man, nor put a long face upon the matter. Do not we know one another? what need of ceremony among friends? we have all a touch of that same-you understand me-a speck of the motley. Beshrew the man who on such a day as this, the general festival, should affect to stand aloof. none of those sneakers. I am free of the corporation, and care not who knows it. He that meets me in the forest to-day, shall meet with no wise-acre, I can tell him. Stultus sum. Translate me that, and take the meaning of it to yourself for your pains. What, man, we have four quarters of the globe on our side, at the least computation.

Fill us a cup of that sparkling gooseberry-we will drink no wise, melancholy, politic port on this day--and let us troll the catch of Amiens-duc ad me-duc ad me--how goes it?

* [It is clearly of transatlantic origin.]

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