r!" cried the exasperated musician; to which my uncle
replied, "Very well, sir, and you are forever beating it!" I do not know
whether Mrs. Rowden knew this anecdote, and engaged Mr. Shaw because he
had elicited this solitary sally from her quondam idol, John Kemble. The
choice, whatever its motive, was not a happy one. The old leader of the
theatrical orchestra was himself no piano-forte player, could no longer
see very well nor hear very well, and his principal attention was
directed to his own share of the double performance, which he led much
after the careless, slap-bang style in which overtures that nobody
listened to were performed in his day. It is a very great mistake to let
learners play with violin accompaniment until they have thoroughly
mastered the piano-forte without it. Fingering, the first of fundamental
acquirements, is almost sure to be overlooked by the master, whose
attention is not on the hands of his pupil but on his own bow; and the
pupil, anxious to keep up with the violin, slurs over rapid passages,
scrambles through difficult ones, and acquires a general habit of merely
following the violin in time and tune, to the utter disregard of steady,
accurate execution. As for me, I derived but one benefit from my old
violin accompanier, that of becoming a good timist; in every other
respect I received nothing but injury from our joint performances,
getting into incorrigible habits of bad fingering, and of making up my
bass with unscrupulous simplifications of the harmony, quite content if
I came in with my final chords well thumped in time and tune with the
emphatic scrape of the violin that ended our lesson. The music my master
gave me, too, was more in accordance with his previous practice as
leader of a theatrical orchestra, than calculated to make me a steady
and scrupulous executant.

We had another master for French and Latin--a clever, ugly, impudent,
snuffy, dirty little man, who wrote vaudevilles for the minor theaters,
and made love to his pupils. Both these gentlemen were superseded in
their offices by other professors before I left school: poor old Pshaw
Pshaw, as we used to call him, by the French composer, Adam, unluckily
too near the time of my departure for me to profit by his strict and
excellent method of instruction; and our vaudevillist was replaced by a
gentleman of irreproachable manners, and I should think morals, who
always came to our lessons _en toilette_--black frock-coat and