minds, for a nation. Sundry ages seem to take sundry tones of opinion and behaviour; and it is the business of education, rightly so called, to foster a good tone of feeling in the rising generation. It is likely that the phase of any age should be deemed a good one by the age itself, but it cannot be tried fairly otherwise than by free truth. We may deem that the quietism of a former generation was less good than the eagerness of our own, and a following one may hereafter think us foolish for our restless labours after gold, and our running over the world for happiness which may be at our own doors, like the woman of the Hindoo adage, who is said to have sent the town-crier for the child that she had overlooked in her arms. In the civil wars we can believe that there was a peaceless apprehension on one side of the loss of freedom, and on the other of the loss of rights; and many of us are so restless in struggles after worldly wealth, which appears to be taken by some as the main good, that we seem to cast all blessings but gold in the face of the Giver of all good, and even to trample gifts of wealth under our feet as long as there is more to be had. For what end do we struggle for wealth but for happiness, which may be enjoyed with but little of it. A poor entomologist is as happy in his search after the bright-winged objects of his thoughts, as is the lord at his hunting; and the botanist, in his discovery of a new plant, has no less a pleasure than that of a man of the world at the making of a new acquaintance. An old madrigal by Gibbons sings— "I see ambition never pleas'd, I see some Tantals starve in store, Another composed by Willbye, in 1528, cries— "What needeth all this travail and turmoiling, To seek this farfetched treasure In those hot climates, under PHEBUS broiling." A quiet generation may choose a soothing music, and an age of eager activity may like stirring strains with a thunder of mighty blasts, and a fire of wild flashes of sound; and we do not set up ourselves as infallible judges of the right and wrong in the tone of national feeling. Quietism may be too inactive, and may need a stirring power, and eagerness may be too wild, so as to want soothing. We reckon it, however; to the praise of the old madrigals and pastoral songs, that they breathe a love of the beautiful in nature and of the charms of rural life, such as that which the old landowners lived under their now fallen or moss-clad gabled roofs by the hill sides, when they rode daily under their own elms, and sat by their own streams, and dwelt among their own poor; and though we do not wish to underrate the pleasure nor the good of a town life, we believe that the squire and his lady are a great blessing to the poor when they dwell among them, and hold daily before their eyes the graceful pattern of the life of Christian gentlefolk, and raise their tone of feeling by kindness and seemly behaviour. We think it good to keep before the eyes of the poor toilers for the bare animal man, even the clean gravel path, the shrub-decked lawn, the bright windows, and the finer form of house life. The flowing harmony of the madrigal began to be stilled at the incoming of the house of Stuart, or at farthest at the beginning of the civil wars; as it seems from Dr. Rimbault's 'Bibliotheca Madrigaliana' that madrigals were not published after 1638, which was about eleven years before the Protectorate of Cromwell. The outwearing of the pure English madrigal happened near the time of the declension of the English architecture, which, under the house of Stewart, began to take the mingled forms of English with Italian, and to be overloaded with little unmeaning ornaments; and Playford, in his 'Introduction to the Skill of Music,' printed in 1703, says, "Our late and solemn music, both vocal and instrumental, is now justled out of esteem by the new corants and jigs of foreigners, to the grief of all sober and judicious understanders of that formerly solid and good musick." The pastoral school of writing which followed that of the madrigals, and held its ground till after the printing of the 'Musical Miscellany' in the time of Queen Ann, and with which we may rank some of the poems of Sir George Etherege, Sir Charles Sedley, the Earl of Roscommon, and other wits of the reign of Charles II, with Prior and Pomfret, seems to have been one of a far less pure and refined taste than that of the former. The madrigals can still win the attention of the finest minds of our time, though but few of the 450 songs of the Musical Mis cellany' are likely to be heard from gentle voices of our generation; and some of them are so loose and profane that none would think of singing them to the warmest lovers of old music. Some of the love-smitten swains and maidens, Damons and Floras of the pastoral song, try to unburden their groaning souls in most sorrowful strains, and the helplessness with which a shepherd sometimes dies under the stroke of his beloved's eye glances, is almost funny. Vol ii, p. 14. Alexis was smitten with the charms of Clorinda whose eyes darted "ten thousand daggers," "He lost his crook, he left his flocks, And wand'ring through the lonely rocks He nourish'd endless woe.' And when at last he hears from her voice the words of woe,"But you shall promise ne'er again To breathe your vows or speak your pain, He bow'd, obey'd, and died." The death of another despairing shepherd, Myrtillo, was no less sudden and peaceful. He is jilted by his love, and cries "In this cold bank I'll make my grave, And there for ever lie, Sad nightingales the watch shall keep Then down the shepherd lay to sleep, And never wak'd again.' Another despairing lover thinks of his love and his rival, and cries "The thought distracts my brain. O cruel maid!' Then swooning, Another does struggle against his sorrow, but bootlessly. "How oft, on barks of stately trees And on the tufted greens, Ingraved he tells of his disease And what his soul sustains; Yet fruitless all his sorrows prov'd, And fruitless all his art, She scorn'd the more the more he lov'd, And broke at last his heart." In the song of Lucy and Colin, the forlorn Lucy dies brokenhearted; and as she is borne in her winding-sheet, to the church, she meets Colin coming forth "in wedding trim so gay" as the bridegroom of another bride. An incident for a good ballad. Very different from Lucy is the proud Nelly who scorns a poor swain, singing with a very naughty thought at the end of her strain, My father has riches store, Two hundred a year and more, Beside sheep and cows, carts, harrows, and plows. His age is above three-score." The sorrow of another swain must have been very hard to bear. Poets of the pastoral school sometimes cast even their poems on political events into the eclogue form. A poem set to music among Dr. Blow's works complains in the words of Galatæa, a shepherdess, in a pastoral dialogue, that the birthday of the Princess (Anne?) was not celebrated in February, 1698; and makes even her a shepherdess: and the grieving swain sings of her, "She long preserv'd our threat'ned flocks, When herds of woolves came howling down." Whether the 'woolves' were Tories or Whigs we know not. A song in vol. iii is stated to be written on a lady's birthday; but it makes her a shepherdess, and cries,— "Haste, shepherds, haste, and come away, This joyful sun gave Chloe birth, Chloe, the goddess of the May: Leave all your flocks and come to mirth." Another song invites the ladies to leave the town for the country, with a promise of charms of which, after all, we fear they thought very little. "We'll show you all our cowslip-meads And pleasant woods and springs, And lead you to the tuneful shades Sweet Philomel, whose warbling throat Excels your senefino's note. Fa, la, &c." In another ode, in praise of rural life, the poet sings that he 1.- -4 26 would not bear the turmoil of life in town for all the wealth of the cits and courtiers who were immured in it. He asks, "For who, for the sake of possessing the ore, Would be sentenc'd to dig in the mine?" A question which in our days of gold-diggers would most likely bring the querist an answer that would make him look foolish at the mighty throng that readily sentence themselves to the work. Another song in vol. vi paints rural life in such charming colours that, if we trust to it, we must believe that the life of the homely steppers over buttercups and daisies, is little happier under the good Victoria than it was under Queen Anne. It sings "Happy is a country life, Blest with content, good health, and ease, We only plot ourselves to please. And love or welcome dreams at night." We think it may be said in favour of the madrigals of the best age, that they mostly speak of woman in a way worthy of the feeling, delicacy, purity, and grace, by which she refines the otherwise growing coarseness of the stronger sex. The bards and scalds may have mostly sounded the crimson string of war, but they sometimes struck the tones of love; and the minnesingers and troubadours may more often have fulfilled a good office in the helping of the refining power of the fair sex on the minds of men daily under the brutalizing power of war, at the inroad of the northern tribes over the Roman empire; and thence may have arisen the high-mindedness of the chevalier "sans peur et sans reproche," such as Bayard and Don Quixote, who, although he may never have lived in the body, may be an embodiment of the knightly mind of Cervantes' times. The pastoral and other songs of the Musical Miscellany sing the praise of woman, but it is often the praise of the mere animal woman, rather than the whole womanly type of delicacy and grace; and is not so much a praise of woman as she ought to be, as a temptation to make her what she should not become. Some vows of constancy which are breathed by songs of our collection are patterns of lover's eloquence. One of them is"Sooner the seas shall cease to flow, Their waves the Alps shall cover, |