ish Room again as a
School after the legal difficulty about getting rid of the tenant, but
to their credit be it said they made an exception in favour of
music--with a proviso. The late Mr. James Richardson, when a young
man, it is on record, applied to the Parish Authorities "on behalf of
several persons forming a Musical Band of this Town, that they may be
allowed the use of the Vestry Room to meet and practise in." "Allowed
providing they pay the constable to attend and see that everything is
left secure and to prevent the boys annoying them or doing mischief to
the premises."

Music, though confined to a few choice spirits beneath fustian and
smock frocks in village as well as town, played a much more important
part with our grandfathers than is commonly supposed. It may seem a
rash statement to make that in some respects we may have degenerated.
If we play or sing with better tune or finish it is because we have
better appliances, not better brains nor more devoted hearts for music.
I am afraid that some of our extensive cultivation of music is a
sacrifice of fond parents on the altar of the proprieties, whereas our
grandfathers had a soul in their work, and the man with his heart in
his work--whether scraping a fiddle, ploughing a furrow, writing an
epic, or fighting a battle--must, by all honest men, be awarded the
palm. In this over-riding of music as a hobby there is a danger that
the salt may lose its savour, for if there is any individual more to be
pitied than another it is the so-called musician standing up to play
according to the rules of art with no response from the inmost soul of
him.

I do not think, at any rate, that those of our grandfathers who
directed their attention to the fiddle, bass-viol, flute, clarionet, or
trombone, could be fairly considered to lay under such reproach, for
though their music may have been sometimes flat and sometimes sharp, it
was always natural and congenial in the highest degree.

These old fellows took down such instruments as they had, not as so
many do now, because it was "the thing" to learn music, but because
music had found them out for having a love of it, and of the pleasure
derived from meeting in a homely circle of kindred spirits. Their
instruments were often most dissimilar, but their spirit was one!

There was a good deal of free masonry and companionable relations
existing between these old handlers of musical instruments, and as we
hear them in