he templar, the confessor
of music, was, and concurrently, the apologist of philosophic light.
Engaged to a powerful mechanism of romantic dogma, the nett article of
its creed; the neochromatic acoustic regalia of stage eloquence,
the key, or longest recurrent note; the van or middle the next, the
sinuous lever of stage discipline. After all, concurrently may it
not, be said that this colour instinct aspect of cosmically conceived
romanticism is never wilfully vulgarized. For its incomparable,
iconographical purpose it exists, and is as intrinsically useful and
serviceable to the scheme as the figures which admirably illustrate
the pictures of Hogarth and Holman Hunt. When introduced, music is
rarely intended to edge itself into the important place of "first
study." This in alchemy or personification being occupied by the
circumstantial cruxes of life, philosophic morality, vested usually
in courtly attire; I would not say abstract attire, for the clean-cut
character it bears is too strictly defined (for the sake of that
Artist's art) for such an impression to be born, or even to lurk by
sentiment, there beneath.

The mould employed at all times is minutely fashioned, as a sculptor
would, by investing his model with a code of spirituality, inspired
with fire, which epicureanly endows fleeting emotion with a voice, and
vitality lends also to distant-reaching invisible ends: hinting that
the picturesque alchemy of music is potential too in reaching and
touching the lower chords of animal passion, where movement is rapid
and light redundant. The breast of the thoughtful writer heaved ever
to animal instincts without measure in extolling the complex phases
of court, ecclesiastic, and domestic oligarchy. Statesmanship and
subjunction rise and peacefully sink together, and in his magnetic
touch, are made to harmoniously coalesce in the political balance.
Shorthouse the author, a believer in, a champion was of two-fold or
dual cosmos: his colour sense being susceptible to and wrought upon in
singular consular consistence with the effulgent dogmas of its
creed, and in alliance with the spirit of the _cinque cento_ Italian
Renaissance Schools of Painting and Architecture. Practically
speaking, he conceived a train of adept ideas, at times fanciful, and
at times morbid, transforming them adroitly by adept excursions of
cross-lit introspection, accentuation, and by dint of manual caress,
as the first of players upon stringed inst