presence--a piece of music they had never seen before was placed in
their hands. The first attempt to execute this at sight was lame, and
halted terribly; the second was somewhat better, but as we moved about,
from one pupil to another, to ascertain, as far as possible, the
individual accuracy of the class, we heard many voices, in a subdued
tone, making a number of admirable guesses at their part, but the owners
of which could not, by the utmost courtesy, be considered to be singing
at sight. The basses missed many a "distance," the tenors were
interrupted by the master, and worked, in the defective passages,
separately from the rest of the class for a while, _by ear_!! A third
attempt was made with somewhat better success, and the piece was
accomplished in a rambling uncertain manner. During the whole of this
trial, the trebles were led by the master's apprentice, a sharp clever
boy, who retained a voice of peculiar beauty and power to the unusually
late age of sixteen, and who had commenced his musical studies six or
eight years before. We considered this experiment a failure; it may be
said the fault lay in the teacher, not in the method; true, the master
was not Mr Hullah, but he was one of the "certificated," and the
partisans of Mr Hullah, in the language of the lawyers, are _estopped_
from asserting his incompetency. We have known pupils, not deficient in
general ability, who, having attended the greater part of "the course,"
during which they paid great attention to their studies, were unable to
read more than a few bars of the simplest music, beyond which they were
lost and confused. Without naming the notes _Do, Re,_ &c., they were
utterly unable to proceed at all, and it appeared to us that, by seeing
those syllables written on paper, they would have gathered a more
correct idea of the music, than by attempting to read from music written
in the ordinary manner. This is the result of the invariable use of
those syllables in exercising the voice. In the best continental
schools, they have long been obsolete for such a purpose. Still, the