lained that no organ that he had played in this country
possessed majesty of effect. The advent of Hope-Jones has entirely
changed the situation. Tertius Noble, late of York Minster, England,
who has just come to this country, asserts that organs can be found
here equal to or superior to any built in England, and the celebrated
English organist, Edwin Lemare, pronounced the reeds at Ocean Grove, N.
J., the finest he had ever heard.

[Illustration: ARISTIDE CAVAILLE-COLL.]

CHAPTER XIII.

THE CHIEF ACTORS IN THE DRAMA.

We now purpose to give a brief account of the leaders in
revolutionizing the King of Instruments, the men whose genius and
indomitable perseverance in the face of prejudice, discouragement and
seemingly insurmountable obstacles, financial and otherwise, have made
the modern organ possible. First of all these comes

CHARLES SPACHMAN BARKER,

who was born at Bath, England, on Oct. 10, 1806. Left an orphan when
five years old, he was brought up by his godfather, who gave him such
an education as would fit him for the medical profession, and he was in
due time apprenticed to an apothecary and druggist in Bath. This
apothecary used to draw teeth, and it was Barker's duty to hold the
heads of the patients, whose howls and screams unnerved him so that he
refused to learn the business and left before his term of
apprenticeship expired.

Dr. Hinton does not credit the story that Barker, accidentally
witnessing the operations of an eminent organ-builder (Bishop, of
London) who was erecting an organ in his neighborhood, determined on
following that occupation, and placed himself under that builder for
instruction in the art. It seems to be admitted, however, that after
spending most of the intervening time in London, he returned to Bath
two years afterwards and established himself as an organ-builder there.

About 1832 the newly built large organ in York Minster attracted
general attention, and Barker, impressed by the immense labor
occasioned to the player by the extreme hardness of touch of the keys,
turned his thoughts toward devising some means of overcoming the
resistance offered by the keys to the fingers. The result was the
invention of the pneumatic lever by which ingenious contrivance the
pressure of the wind which occasioned the resistance to the touch was
skilfully applied to lessen it. He wrote to Dr. Camidge, then the
organist of the Cathedral, begging to be allowed to attach one