climes of the south to our ungenial atmosphere, some of the finest
compositions in the continental schools of modern music. Success has,
however, attended most of their enterprises; for the taste of the
English for foreign music is by no means a modern mania. From Pepys's
_Diary_ we learn that the first company of Italian singers came here in
the reign of Charles II.: they were brought by Killigrew from Venice,
about 1688; but they did not perform whole operas, only detached scenes
in recitative, and not in any public theatre, but in the houses of the
nobility. Thus, Italian music was loved and cultivated very early in
England, and London was the next capital, after Vienna, which
established and supported an Italian Opera. But, as we never do things
by halves, we had soon afterwards, two opposition houses. This proves
that the English have a _taste for music_; indeed they have much more
judgment than some of their neighbours, which makes it still more to be
regretted that nothing is done in England towards the advancement of
music as a science. Is the world of sound and the soul of song
exhausted? Why should we, who are marching in every other direction,
stand still in this? But no; what Orpheus did with _music_, we are
striving to accomplish by _steam_; what he effected by quietly touching
his lyre, we study with the atmospheres and condensers of high and low
pressure engines.

The writer of a delightful paper in the _Foreign Review_, No. 3, in
tracing the rise and progress of music, inquires what has become of "its
loftier pretensions, its celestial attributes, its moral and political
influence." He then facetiously observes, "How should we marvel to see
the Duke of Wellington, like another Epaminondas, take his flute out of
his pocket to still the clamour of the opposition, or Mr. Peel reply to
the arguments of Mr. Huskisson with an allegro on the fiddle."