f-fact world of business. One blind fiddler, we know
him well, with face upturned towards the sky, has stood a public
benefactor any day these twenty years, and we know not how much
longer, to receive the substantial homage of the music-loving million.
But that he is scarcely old enough, he might have been the identical
Oxford-Street Orpheus of Wordsworth:--

'His station is there; and he works on the crowd,
He sways them with harmony merry and loud;
He fills with his power all their hearts to the brim--
Was aught ever heard like his fiddle and him?'

Decidedly not--there is nothing to match it; and so thinks 'the
one-pennied boy' who spares him his one penny, and deems it well
bestowed. Then there are the harpers, with their smooth
French-horn-breathing and piccola-piping comrades, who at the soothing
hour of twilight affect the tranquil and retired paved courts or snug
enclosures far from the roar and rumble of chariot-wheels, where,
clustered round with lads and lasses released from the toils of the
day, they dispense romance and sentiment, and harmonious cadences, in
exchange for copper compliments and the well-merited applause of fit
audiences, though few. Again, there are the valorous brass-bands of
the young Germans, who blow such spirit-stirring appeals from their
travel-worn and battered tubes--to say nothing of the thousand
performers of solos and duets, who, wherever there is the chance of a
moment's hearing, are ready to attempt their seductions upon our ears
to the prejudice of our pockets. All these we must pass over with this
brief mention upon the present occasion; our business being with their
numerous antitheses and would-be rivals--the incarnate nuisances who
fill the air with discordant and fragmentary mutilations and
distortions of heaven-born melody, to the distraction of educated ears
and the perversion of the popular taste.

'Music by handle,' as it has been facetiously termed, forms our
present subject. This kind of harmony, which is not too often
deserving of the name, still constitutes, notwithstanding the large
amount of indisputable talent which derives its support from the
gratuitous contributions of the public, by far the larger portion of
the peripatetic minstrelsy of the metropolis. It would appear that
these grinders of music, with some few exceptions which we shall
notice as we proceed, are distinguished from their praiseworthy
exemplars, the musicians, by one re