as in our taste for music: nowhere does the public ear embrace a wider range of musical enjoyment and knowledge; nowhere do the various professors of musical art find fairer hearing or better pay. We have been brought up, as Mr. Rogers says, "in the religion of Handel." Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven are household names among us. We have been learning to like the Italian Opera for the last 150 years at an insane cost. The English musical festivals have been the first in the world both in time and in excellence, and in them the finest achievements of Spohr and Mendelssohn have first found a hearing; while at the same time our solemn cathedral services have preserved the worship of the beautiful English anthem, and some faithful club in every provincial town kept alive the practice of our native glee and madrigal. The English, it must be remembered, do that homage to the fire of Italy and the thought of Germany which neither does to the other. An Italian cannot appreciate the intellectual depths of a German symphony: a German cannot follow the impetuous declamation of an Italian recitative. Handel, in the mouths of most Italian singers, is clothed in a false costume; and as for a thorough-paced German female singer interpreting a solo of Rossini's, we would as soon make it over to an English oysterwoman.

We look with most pride on our national appreciation of Handel. We pensioned him as soon as he appeared, and kept him. The French starved poor Mozart, and dismissed him. Why should not

the latter have become the same musical benefactor to them as Handel has been to us? Such encouragements are repaid a hundred fold into our bosoms. What adopted stranger ever deserved the gratitude of a whole people more than Handel does ours? What genius ever gave pleasure of a higher and purer kind to a larger number of our countrymen than that of the mighty master has done, and is ever doing?—for here alone his music is played as he intended it to be here alone the tradition of his teaching has never been lost sight of-here alone, therefore, his power really tells. He lived long enough among us to become acquainted with the religious depths of genuine English feeling, and gave it a rich endowment and true echo. We feel, on returning from hearing the Messiah,' as if we had shaken off some of our dirt and dross-as if the world were not so much with us. Our hearts are elevated, and yet subdued, as if the glow of some good action or the grace of some noble principle had passed over them. We are conscious of having indulged in an enthusiasm which cannot lead us astray -of having tasted a pleasure which is not of the forbidden tree, for it is the only one which is distinctly promised to be translated with us from earth to heaven. Who is there of any sound musical taste, or fair musical opportunities, with whom one or more of Handel's solemn sentences of mixed musical and religious emphasis is not laid by among the sacred treasures of his memory, to refresh himself with when weary? Milton's verse in the

Christmas Hymn' seems a prophecy Handel was sent to fulfil

"For if such holy song

Enwrap our fancy long,

Time will run back and fetch the age of gold,

And speckled vanity

Will sicken soon and die,

And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould:

And hell itself will pass away,

And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day."

George III.'s enthusiastic love for Handel seems to us the second best example he set his people-his own righteous life being the first. We almost feel as if Handel's sacred music would have reproved the French of infidelity, and enticed the Scotch from Presbyterianism; though perhaps the French crusade would have proved the more successful of the two, for, of all the fancies of a fretful conscience which liberty of opinion has engendered, that which many excellent people entertain on the subject of sacred music seems to us the most perverse. It is useless arguing with those who mistake a total ignorance of the sacred things of art for a higher sense of the proprieties of religion, and who, if they consistently follow up their own line of argument, must class Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and indeed all those whose powers have been of that high order which only the highest themes could expand, as so many delegates of Satan mysteriously permitted to entrap man to his fall through his loftiest instincts of beauty and reverence- -as if, alas! he had not enough to ruin him without that. For those who forge the

temptation are the real foes. There is no reasoning with those who think it wrong to be edified except when in actual worship, and wicked to praise God in any music but such as is ordinary enough for the whole congregation to join in. Human nature is a strange thing-never a greater puzzle perhaps than when it conscientiously abjures one of the few pure pleasures with which the hands of virtue are strengthened here below.

The mistake consists in ever bringing such matters into the bondage of religious conscience, instead of leaving them to the liberty of mere feeling. At most the objection can be but relative. "To him that esteemeth anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean "—not to others; therefore let him not re

quire the same abstinence from them. But we con

fess that we are not inclined to be so tolerant with that objection against the private character of the performers, which, in default of all real argument against the music, is so triumphantly brought forward. We do not admit that the work is to be condemned in the workman, or the art in the artist. At the same time, if there be any line of life the members of which invariably give occasion for scandal, it is but natural and right that it should fall into disrepute. But this is not the case with music. Of course, if we employ foreigners, we must expect them to offend our canons of morality as much in the profession of Music as in any other calling. But this does not apply to our sacred performances. There the parts are, with rare exceptions, filled up

by our own countrymen and countrywomen, who, as far as human judgment can decide, are as blameless in their lives and conduct as those who hear them, or those who do not.

As regards the composers, we are unwilling to believe that any ever attempted to express the awful truths of sacred subjects without hearts attuned to the task they had undertaken. Handel was jealous when the bishops sent him words for anthems, as he felt it implied his ignorance of the Holy Scriptures. "I have read my Bible "-said he," I shall choose for myself;" and his selection was better than theirs. Haydn wrote at the commencement of all his scores "In nomine Domini," or "Soli Deo Gloria ;" and at the end of them, "Laus Deo." "When I was occupied upon the Creation," he says, “always before I sat down to the piano I prayed to God with earnestness that he would enable me to praise Him worthily." We We may perhaps damage this anecdote. by adding that, whenever he felt the ardour of his imagination decline, or was stopped by some insuperable difficulty, he rose from the pianoforte and began to run over his rosary-but it was a method, he says, which he never found to fail. Mozart composed his Requiem with the shadow of death upon him, feeling it to be a solemn duty which he must work while there was still life to fulfil; and who is there that can hear it without the sense of its sublimity being enhanced by the remembrance of its being the work of the dying for the dead?

It is not possible to conceive that any religious