the bell, and enquired for Peter Schlemihl; but whether the waiter was in his confidence, or whether Peter Schlemihl had managed to make his entrance and his exit without being perceived, I do not know, but the waiter certainly denied all knowledge of Peter Schlemihl!

I then detailed the whole of my adventures to my wife, commencing with the first obtrusion of Peter Schlemihl into the room, and ending with his jumping upon my toes when he took his final departure.

Still she said it was but a dream! I took off my stockings, and showed her my toes, red and angry, and evidently glazed and sore from the stamping and trampling, and nibbling and biting, to which they had been subjected; and I asked her whether, with such proof as that before her eyes, she could entertain any doubt of my having been abused and ill-treated, through the instrumentality of Peter Schlemihl.

Still she persisted that it was but a dream!

I then rang the bell, and requested the attendance of Mr Parry, and every man and woman-servant in the house. I described Peter Schlemihl-a tall, thin, gentlemanly-looking man, aged about thirty, dressed in a black surtout, black stock, and dark trousers-a long nose, sharpish features, dark eyes, and black hair-wore his hat aside, a walking-stick in his hands, and a pair of boots on his feet, with plaguy thick heels.

One and all declared they had seen

no such man!

I begged of Mr Parry that he would search about the premises for him, and desire that stout gentleman, Mr Smith, to prevent his going away by any of the packets. "You will be sure to find him," said I," and he has got the Custom-house clock in his pocket." But stout Mr Smith avers that he has not yet received threepence from him, and to this hour he remains undiscovered, which is to me very remarkable.

I suffered such torment in my feet, that I soon afterwards went to bed, but not to sleep; for the infamous treatment to which my toes had been exposed occasioned such achings and twinges, that I could not close my eyes; and, to make matters worse, when I attempted to rise in the morn

ing, I was unable to put a foot to the floor.

A surgeon (a medical gentleman, the cant phrases for one of those bundles of cruelty) was immediately called in, and, in looking at my toes, he significantly said, "It is the gout!"

Wishing to undeceive him, I gave him a minute narrative of all I had endured-told him the various stampings and squeezings to which I had been a martyr-the nibblings and bitings that I had undergone, when Peter Schlemihl compelled me to do duty for a fish-line off the Isle of Man, and the savage jump with which the brute treated me when he took himself away!

"It is all a dream!" said my wife. "It is dispepsia and night-mare," said the doctor," and the result is the gout!"

It drove me nearly mad to see such obstinacy, but I had no remedy but patience. The doctor ordered flannel, and my lower extremities were forthwith folded up in yard upon yard of that material. It is now a fortnight since I stood upon my feet, and the doctor is such heathen as to tell me, without allowing the information for a moment to disturb the gravity of his countenance, that possibly, after a month or six weeks' further suffering, such as that I now endure, I may be enabled to get out on crutches. He evidently thinks that I am possessed of the stoical endurance of a North American Indian, or of one of those ancient martyrs who expiated their sins by calmly submiting to be roasted to death at the stake-alas! I do not possess the unflinching courage of the one nor the pious resolution of the other; but, like an ordinary mortal, look upon pain as by no means a contemptible evil, and as a thing which every right-minded man will carefully eschew, especially when it takes up its abode in the ancles or the toes.

In the mean time I am suffering seriously from his treatment. He is giving me medicine, as he says, to strengthen and restore the tone of my stomach, and that I may not wear the stomach out, he scarcely allows me to put any thing into it; whilst each time my room door is opened there rushes in a perfume of turtle-soup that almost brings tears to my eyes!

Five times every day since I have

been under this wicked man's care, as he calls it, I have endeavoured to convince him of his error, by narrating fully and minutely the particulars of my unfortunate ramble with Peter Schlemihl, but he is one of those thoroughly obstinate men upon whom reason and argument are thrown away; and my wife, I am sorry to say, is equally hard to be convinced.

She still says, "It was all a dream!" The doctor still says, "It was dispepsia and nightmare, and the result is the gout!"

Whilst I contend, with all the confidence of truth, that my ramble with Peter Schlemihl was a real and bonâ fide ramble!

Which do you think is right?

But

We

THAT Mr William Gardiner, of the house of Gardiner and Son, of Leicester, hosiers and stocking-makers, is a most respectable tradesman and a pleasant member of society, is a proposition which we are willing to assume, and which few of our readers may be able to deny. why Mr William Gardiner, of Gardiner and Son, should publish two stout octavo volumes, containing his personal recollections, is a riddle, which, even after a careful perusal of the pub. lication, we are unable to solve. We do not discover that this gentleman has either encountered any adventures which it can interest mankind to learn, or that he is in possession of any views or information, which might not have descended with him to the grave, without the world being a loser. cannot admit that the circumstances of Mr Gardiner having previously put some stupid words of his own to the music of others, of his having added fantastical notes to apocryphal lives of Haydn and Mozart, or of his having written a stupid and drivelling book on the music of Nature, can afford either justification or apology for the course now pursued. Many a man may be allowed to join in conversation who has no right to make himself the theme. Many a man may offer his humble contribution to the stock of literature, in whom an attempt at autobiography can only be regarded as downright impudence. But having paid our four-and-twenty shillings for the volumes, we are determined to have our value out of Mr Wm. Gardiner: as, if we cannot get instruction from

the book, we shall endeavour to extract amusement; and as we have found it impossible to laugh with Mr Gardiner, let us even try to laugh a little at him.

Not content with introducing himself to our notice, Mr Gardiner is determined to make us hand and glove with his relations. We are, accordingly, presented to old Thomas and young Thomas, the grandfather and father of our hero. The family, it appears, were members of the Presbyterian congregation, or Great Meetting, of Leicester; but, alas for evil communication, there is strong reason to suspect that the autobiographer came soon to look with contempt on puritanical opinions, and ultimately to view with indulgent toleration the heresies of Socinianism itself. We greatly question, at least, whether Mr Gardiner's book will elicit much sympathy from his fellow Presbyterians on this side of the Tweed. The principal topic in his account of Leicester Presbyterianism, is the great progress which was made by the congregation in psalmody. "Our forefathers," he tells us, "were so rigid in avoiding every ceremony of the Church, that they would not allow the use of a musical instrument to set the tune, and it was not uncommon for the clerk to give a flourish upon his voice before he commenced. The clerk in the Great Meeting, however, was a person of more discreet manners; and, by way of pitching the key gently, sounded the bottom of a brass candlestick, in the shape of a bell." Gradually, "as some of the most intelligent and

Longman.

wealthy families attended this place, and the taste for music improved, the direction of the psalmody was taken from the clerk, and given to a few qualified persons. A choir was thus formed, of which my father took the lead. At this time he had just purchased Dr Croft's work, entitled Musica Sacra, a collection of anthems, which could not be performed without an instrumental bass, and the society consented that a bass viol should be procured of Baruch Norman, for this purpose."

Mr Gardiner made his appearance on the scene, about ten years after the bass fiddle, or on the 15th of March, 1770. While thus particular as to the period of his birth, however, he is shamefully negligent as to some other dates. For instance, the time of the following anecdote is left in considerable obscurity, though the uncertainty is calculated to affect in a very delicate point, the reputation of a lady who once enjoyed some celebrity. "Having been put into a suit of nankeen, which had a smart appearance, Dr Arnold, our near neighbour, requested to have my clothes tried on his son, who was of the same age. For this purpose I was carried in the morning to the Doctor's house, stripped and put into bed to the historian Mrs Macauley." Oddly enough, Mr Gardiner ascribes to this event the origin of his taste for melodious sounds, having been greatly delighted on the occasion, with "the chimes of a musical clock which stood by the bedside." We should, ourselves, however, have been inclined to ascribe to this bedding a musical propensity of another kind, of which the most ordinary variety is erroneously supposed to be indigenous to Scotland, but of which we can easily discover a modified form in our author's prurient attachment to liberal opinions in politics. Whiggery, it is well known, like the other impurities in the blood to which we have referred, is readily communicated by the skin, and we know of few persons (not excepting Miss Martineau herself) from whose vicinity the infection would be likely to be caught in a worse shape than from that democratical blue-stocking, Kate Macauley.

We pass over many interesting incidents in our hero's early life, and can only notice, in a cursory manner, his composition of a psalm tune under the name of Paxton; an effusion which, he

VOL. XLV. NO. CCLXXXII.

tells us, was prompted by an affair of love rather than ambition. "It became a favourite, and I had the supreme gratification to know that it was admired by the object of my adoration !" It is unnecessary to point out the good taste of this statement, or the high devotional feelings under which this coup d'essai of the author of the Sacred Melodies must thus have been composed. We must pass over with still slighter notice the history of his early acquaintance with Sir Richard Phillips and Mr Daniel Lambert, two of the greatest and heaviest men in their respective departments that England has produced. It would be injustice, however, to Mr Gardiner, to omit the following philosophical observations on the superior importance of infancy, as compared with the remainder of our existence. "Lord Brougham has asserted that we learn more in the first six years of our life than afterwards, though we live to a hundred. Probably this is true; we learn to speak our own language, and that more perfectly than foreigners could do in a life. We learn the quality of things, whether they are large or small, rough or smooth, their shape and colour; whether they are near to us or distant; their lightness or weight; their smell and taste, and the sounds they utter; and we learn to call every thing by its right name." Mr Gardiner might have added that the accomplishment which he has last mentioned is but too frequently lost in after life. In the same original strain we are apprised that "the bent of our minds greatly depends upon example and early associations;" in proof of which it is stated that Mr Gardiner's musical taste is to be ascribed to the habits of his father, who sang and played upon the violoncello; while his other accomplishments are traced to his associating with "a gentleman I much esteemed, Mr Coltman, senior, my father's partner in trade. I was ten years of age when this connexion took place; and, from the first moment I fell into the company of this gentleman, I was struck with the great superiority of his conversational powers.' "The brilliancy of his imagination," he adds, "reminded me of Burke." Mr Gardiner must have been a remarkable boy to have acquired so early an appreciation of conversational powers, and must, we presume, have been acquainted

2 K

with Burke in a previous state of existence, so as to be thus platonically reminded of him by his father's partner. One of Mr Coltman's great friends was Dr Priestley, who, we are gravely told by our autobiographer, "was the greatest philosopher, Newton excepted, that this country or any other has produced!" This is pretty strong: Pythagoras, Aristotle, Archimedes, Copernicus, Galileo, Napier, Boyle, Black, and Franklin, not to mention the greatest names in ethical or metaphysical science, which Mr Gardiner would exclude, perhaps, from the appellation of philosophy, must all hide their diminished heads before Dr Priestley. For this honour, we suspect, Dr Priestley is less indebted to his scientific discoveries, than to the circumstances that he was a dissenting parson, an apostle of the French Revolution, and a friend of Mr Coltman, senior, "my father's partner in trade."

The whole complexion of Mr Gardiner's book points him out as one of those unhappy persons who, with weak stomachs and weaker understandings, are easily made proselytes to the various forms of folly and fanaticism in which squeamishness exhibits itself→→→ such as, abstinence from animal food, advocacy of the abolition of capital punishments, tee-totalism, free trade, the voluntary principle, and laxity, under the name of liberty, of conscience. Mr Gardiner, at an early period, embraced the first-mentioned of these absurdities, of which, however, he was somewhat roughly cured by one "Master Brooke."

"I was in the constant habit of visiting Mr Brooke, and had great pleasure in his company. Having read Dr Lardner's reasons for not eating animal food, I became a convert, and for three years lived entirely upon milk and vegetable diet. One evening, when I was supping with him, a beef-steak was placed upon the table; and, on being helped, I said, "You know, sir, I don't eat meat ;" but he sternly insisted upon my partaking of it, and immediately, from underneath the cushion of the sofa, drew out a brace of horse-pistols, and declared he would shoot me through the head, if I did not comply. Knowing him to be an eccentric man, with the muzzle at my forehead, I thought it wise to begin; and after the first mouthful, he exclaimed, There, sir, I have saved your life! I took the same foolish resolution into my head, and you see what a lath I have made of my

self." After this adventure, I gave up my ́ abstemious plan, and resumed my former mode of living. I felt no diminution of my spirits or bodily health in any part of my three years of abstinence, and my intellects, perhaps, were rather brighter."

It would be strange indeed, if, under any regimen, they were more dull than they now are. But the observance of a Brahminical diet is not the only symptom of a disordered system that Mr Gardiner has exhibited. Liberalism in politics and religion is far more deplorable; and it would have been well for Mr Gardiner if, in early life, he had come in contact with our friend Christopher's crutch, which might have cured him of his propensity to sympathize with Paines and Priestleys, to whine over a French war, and to calumniate George the Third, as effectually as Mr Brooke's pistol converted him from eating no meat.

His

We presume that Mr Gardiner's pretensions to be an autobiographer are founded chiefly on his musical attainments. Let us enquire a little, therefore, of what order these are. Mr Gardiner, for aught we know, is possessed of a tolerable ear, in the ordinary sense of the word, and having now dabbled in music for about halfa-century, partly as an amateur, and partly as a professional bookmaker, he has acquired enough of familiarity with the subject to enable him to dogmatise upon it, and enough of knowledge to help him to blunder. main peculiarity seems to consist in a silly and insatiable appetite for jingling and jumping melodies, such as would best befit a barrel organ, or set in motion the feet and sticks of a provincial pit on a Saturday night. This taste has led him to swell the bulk, at the same time that he increases the price, of his volumes, by engravings of numerous airs, of which the following or similar tunes form a considerable proportion: "C'est l'amour,” "Cherry-ripe," "Come, cheer up, my lads,' "I've been roaming,"

"The White Cockade," &c. To the higher qualities of musical expression we take Mr Gardiner to be wholly indifferent, and we desire no better proof of our opinion than his account of the Festival in Westminster Abbey, in 1791, at which this harmonious hosier was present, but of which his description is destitute of every trace either of sense or of sensibility. Only inferior in interest to the Commemoration

of Handel itself, a nobler or more stirring scene than that which Westminster Abbey then presented, for lovers of music of the highest class, can scarcely be conceived, and we should have expected that the compiler of Judah, and the editor of the Sacred Melodies, would have assumed a virtue if he had it not, and have made some attempt, if not to inspire his readers with an impressive feeling of this noble occasion, at least to show that his own state of mind had not been

unworthy of it. Compare, reader, with your lowest idea of what it ought to have been, the following account of these divine performances, which prompted and inspired Haydn to produce his Creation, but which failed to elevate the soul of Mr William Gardiner above the dust and the drivel in which he delights to dwell. It is some fifty degrees more vulgar and destitute of feeling than the worst part of Pepys' Theatrical Criticisms, while it must be recollected that Pepys had the modesty to consign to the obscurity of Cyphea and the concealment of a hole in the wall what Mr Gardiner publishes with self-complacency.

66

On entering the Abbey, the magnitude of the orchestra filled me with surprise; it rose nearly to the top of the west window, and above the arches of the main aisle. There was, on each side, a tier of projecting galleries, in one of which I was placed. Above us were the trumpeters, who had appended to their instruments richly embossed banners worked in silver and gold, and we had flags of the same de

scription, which gave the whole a gorgeous and magnificent appearance. The arrangement of the performers was admirable, particularly that of the soprani. The young ladies were placed upon a frame-work in the centre of the band, in the form of a pyramid, as you see flower-pots set up for show. This greatly improved the musical effect. The band was a thousand strong, ably conducted by Josiah Bates, upon the organ. It was directed, that during the choruses, no one should desist from play ing, or sit down. An Italian, of the name of Turin (?), having disobeyed this command, one of those precious youths, the Ashleys,

in a loud chorus nailed down his coat to the seat, and on his getting up, he tore off the lap. Pachirotti was singing at the time, when the Italian, in a great rage, called out, Got dem! Got dem! so loud, that it rang through the Abbey, and attracted the attention of the King, who dispatched Lord Sandwich into the orchestra to learn the cause of this disturbance;

but no one dared to hint at the offender. The next day, these lawless gentlemen put twenty penny-worth of halfpence into the inside of his fiddle, the rattling of which at first enraged him, but he contentedly sat down and pocketed the affront. The orchestra was so very steep, that it was dangerous to come down, and some accidents took place; one was of a ludicrous

nature.

A person falling upon a double bass, as it lay on its side, immediately disappeared; nothing was seen of him but his legs protruding out of the instrument. For some time, no one could assist him

for laughing. Haydn was present at this performance; and by the aid of a telescope, planted on a stand near the kettledrums, I saw the composer near the King's box. The performance attracted persons from all parts of Europe; and such was the demand for tickets, that, in some instances, a single one was sold for L.20. The female fashions of the day were found highly inconvenient, particularly the headdresses; and it was ordered that no caps should be admitted of a larger size than the pattern exhibited at the Lord Cham

berlain's office. As every one wore powder, notwithstanding a vast influx of hairdress ers from the country, such was the demand for these artistes, that many ladies submitted to have their hair dressed the previous evening, and sat up all night to be ready for the early admission in the morning."

The music of Westminster Abbey, indeed, seems to have made no impression on our author compared with what he derived at the same period from Hummel's performance of the popular air of the " Ploughboy," which he introduced into a sonata,and played

"with inimitable variations!"

The fact is, that Mr Gardiner has no perception or appreciation whatever of great music-of music in its highest meaning, as the exponent of the loftiest emotions of the mind: as the food of the purest and sublimest longings of the heart and imagination. Sensual or mechanical ideas are all that it conveys to him-it tickles his ear to listen to its tones-it flatters his vanity that he can perceive its structure; but of its moral power, of its intellectual influence, of its spirit, of its poetry, he is as ignorant as the raggedest donkey that ever chewed a thistle. Accordingly, we find him constantly sneering at the ancient school of music, and setting up the modern in opposition to it. Thus in speaking of" The flocks shall leave the mountains," perhaps the most tender and touching strain that ever rung in a