9. The hurdy-gurdy player. We have placed this genius last, because,
though essentially a most horrid grinder, he, too, is in some sort a
performer. In London, there may be said to be two classes of
them--little hopping, skipping, jumping, reeling Savoyard or Swiss
urchins, who dance and sing, and grind and play, doing, like Cæsar,
four things at once, and whom you expect every moment to see rolling
on the pavement, but who continue, like so many kittens, to pitch on
their feet at last, notwithstanding all their antics--and men with
sallow complexions, large dark eyes, and silver ear-rings, who stand
erect and tranquil, and confer a dignity, not to say a grace, even
upon the performance of the hurdy-gurdy. The boys for the most part do
not play any regular tune, having but few keys to their instruments,
often not even a complete octave. The better instruments of the adult
performers have a scale of an octave and a half, and sometimes two
octaves, and they perform melodies and even harmonies with something
like precision, and with an effect which, to give it its due praise,
supplies a very tolerable caricature of the Scotch bagpipes. These
gentry are not much in favour either with the genuine lovers of music
or the lovers of quiet, and they know the fact perfectly well. They
hang about the crowded haunts of the common people, and find their
harvest in a vulgar jollification, or an extempore 'hop' at the door
of a suburban public-house on a summer night. There are a few
old-women performers on this hybrid machine, one of whom is familiar
to the public through the dissemination of her _vera effigies_ in a
contemporary print.

The above are all the grinders which observation has enabled us to
identify as capable of classification. The reader may, if he likes,
suppose them to be the metropolitan representatives of the nine