ring good
music of all kinds been extending.

Take up a daily newspaper, published any time between April and
August, and range your eye down the third or fourth column of the
first page--what an endless array of announcements of music, vocal and
instrumental! Music for the classicists; music for the crowd;
symphonies and sonatas; ballads and polkas; harmonic societies; choral
societies; melodists' clubs; glee clubs; madrigal clubs. Here you have
the quiet announcement of a quartett-party; next to it, the
advertisement of one of the Philharmonic Societies--the giants of the
musical world; pianoforte teachers announce one of their series of
classic performances; great instrumental soloists have each a concert
for the special behoof and glorification of the _beneficiaire_. Mr
So-and-so's grand annual concert jostles Miss So-and-so's annual
benefit concert. There are Monday concerts, and Wednesday concerts,
and Saturday concerts; there are weekly concerts, fortnightly
concerts, and monthly concerts; there are concerts for charities, and
concerts for benefits; there are grand morning concerts, and grand
evening concerts; there are _matinees musicales_, and _soirees
musicales_; there are meetings, and unions, and circles, and
associations--all of them for the performance of some sort of music.
There are musical entertainments by the score: in the City; in the
suburbs; at every institute and hall of science, from one end of
London to the other. One professor has a ballad entertainment; a
second announces a lecture, with musical illustrations; a third
applies himself to national melodies. All London seems vocal and
instrumental. Every dead wall is covered with naming _affiches_,
announcing in long array the vast army of vocal and instrumental
talent which is to assist at such and such a morning performance; and
the eyes of the owner of a vast musical stomach are dazzled and
delighted by programmes which will at least demand five hours in the
performance.

So is London, in the course of the season, the congress of nearly all
the performing musical notabilities of Europe. Time has been when they
came to London for cash, not renown: now they come for both. A London
reputation is beginning to rival a Parisian vogue, besides being ten
times more profitable; and, accordingly, from every musical corner in
Christendom, phenomena of art pour in, heralded by the utmost possible
amount of puffing, and equally anxious to secure English