small imp as he was, even in his long coats; and to make him glow,
tremble, and blush with a passion, that not faintly indicated the
day-spring of that absorbing sentiment, which was afterwards destined
to overwhelm and subdue his nature quite, for Alice W----n.

I even think that _sentimentally_ I am disposed to harmony. But
_organically_ I am incapable of a tune. I have been practising "_God
save the King_" all my life; whistling and humming of it over to
myself in solitary corners; and am not yet arrived, they tell me,
within many quavers of it. Yet hath the loyalty of Elia never been
impeached.

I am not without suspicion, that I have an undeveloped faculty of
music within me. For, thrumming, in my wild way, on my friend A.'s
piano, the other morning, while he was engaged in an adjoining
parlour,--on his return he was pleased to say, "_he thought it could
not be the maid_!" On his first surprise at hearing the keys touched
in somewhat an airy and masterful way, not dreaming of me, his
suspicions had lighted on _Jenny_. But a grace, snatched from a
superior refinement, soon convinced him that some being,--technically
perhaps deficient, but higher informed from a principle common to all
the fine arts,--had swayed the keys to a mood which Jenny, with all
her (less-cultivated) enthusiasm, could never have elicited from them.
I mention this as a proof of my friend's penetration, and not with any
view of disparaging Jenny.

Scientifically I could never be made to understand (yet have I taken
some pains) what a note in music is; or how one note should differ
from another. Much less in voices can I distinguish a soprano from a
tenor. Only sometimes the thorough bass I contrive to guess at, from