of places, denoting points where such objects anciently stood, as Rodborough, Rodbourne, Rodmell, Rodmersham; but this must not be confounded with the termination royd, or rode in Yorkshire, which implies a "ridding," or forest clearance, as in Ackroyd, Holroyd, &c. The Anglo-Saxon ceáp implies commerce or marketing, and is retained in such names as Eastcheap, Cheapside, Chipping-Norton, Chipping-Ongar, Chippenham. Chepstow is literally "the marketplace." The prefix charl is the Anglo-Saxon ceorl, churl, husbandman, and occurs in Charlton, Charlwood, Charlesworth, Charlcote, all implying the residence of serfs or bondmen. Swán is a herdsman, or pastoral servant; hence the analogous Swanburn, Swandean, Swanscomb, saving the right of swan (unaccented), which designates the aquatic fowl. There is history in such names, as well as in the ever-recurring Kingstons, Bishopstons, and Prestons (Preostes tún), which indicate the preponderance of kingly and priestly influence at the time when they were originally applied; and as the pagan Saxons have left traces of their old creed in our local nomenclature, so their Christian descendants have transmitted to us many memorials of their adherence to a purer faith in the names of which "church," "kirk," and "minster" form a part. We have thus indicated the main sources, and examined some of the materials, of the local names of this country. To do justice to the subject would require the space of an ample volume rather than that of a brief and cursory review. We have departed in some measure from our ordinary course in saying so little of the books which stand at the head of our article. Our reference to the 'Codex Diplomaticus,' indeed, has only been for names; for to discuss the many deeply interesting topics which a perusal of the charters suggests in relation to the customs and habits of thought which existed among our Anglo-Saxon forefathers, would require a much larger amount of space and labour than we can at present devote to it. ART. IV.-English Music and Madrigals. The MUSICAL MISCELLANY; being a COLLECTION of CHOICE SONGS, set to the VIOLIN and FLUTE, by the most eminent Masters. London: Printed by and for John Watts, at the Printing Office in Wild Court, near Lincoln's-Inn-Fields. THIS MDCCXXIX. HIS work, which, we believe is now rather scarce, was printed in six volumes, two in 1729, two more in 1730, and the last two in 1731, and contains, as we are told by the advertisement to the reader, "several songs entirely new, and many others that were never before set to music," as well as many that had already gone into singer's hands. The six volumes contain more than 450 songs, on love, drinking, hunting, and politics, though Venus and Cupid may claim a far greater share of them than Minerva, Diana, or Bacchus. Our cyclopedia of fine music is now become very large, if we reckon only such works as those of the old madrigal writers, and the church music, oratorios, operas, and concert music of Purcell, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, Mendelsohn, and the great musicians of our days, with the old English, Irish, Welsh, and Scotch airs. And if an Englishman had a complete collection of good music, with all the fine strains of old English song, then, although the sprites of the composers were to glide in and take each his own works, and the Germans were to withdraw with a heavy load of their score, and the Italians and French were to bow themselves out with their tomes of dotted harmony, while the Welsh harper should vanish to the West with his bundle of British melody, and the bards of Ireland were to take off their charming bits of wild song, yet, though his store would be wofully diminished, he would retain some music worthy of its name and of a musical nation, and which belongs only to England. His shelves would still be ready to afford him some good psalm tunes, with canons, madrigals, glees, rounds, and other kinds of convivial music, which are gems of skill for melody, harmony, and worth, and which, we think, have been of no slight power in the civilisation of the nation. The madrigal is by name the Italian madrigale, which is defined as a short lyric poem, not bound to an order of rhymes,* and it * Poesià lirica breve, e non sogetta a ordine di rime. was a known form of poem in the time of Petrarch, who has left some specimens of it, of eight, nine, or ten lines; but the glee is a true English form of harmonized song, and takes its name, glee, from its music, as the Saxon word glig means music, or mirthful song, or minstrelsy. King Alfred is said to have gone into the Danish camp as a gligman, and Edmund, son of Ethelred, gave his gligman a villa. In the tenth year of Richard II, John of Gaunt is said to have erected a court of minstrels, and music has been long holden at the Universities as one of the Quadrivium, or four sciences, of which the others are arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. We are not every way more musical than our forefathers. We have more pianofortes than they had of virginals or spinets, but less viols, polyphants, orpherions, and theorbos than sounded in their hands; and singing may now be learnt by more girls, but by fewer men, than in the time of Isaac Walton, when it seems to have been the daily sweetener of social hours; and it is stated in the preface to Galliard's 'Cantatas,' 1720, as it is quoted by Dr. Rimbault, in his 'Bibliotheca Madrigaliana,' that in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, "Nobody could pretend to a liberal education who had not made such progress in music as to be able to sing his part at sight; and it was usual, when ladies and gentlemen met, for madrigal books to be laid open before them, and every one to sing their part.” Queen Elizabeth, as we read, was a skilful performer on the virginals, and John Playford, in his 'Introduction to the Skill of Music,' 1703, says that he had been informed by an ancient musician and her servant, that "she did often recreate herself on an excellent instrument, call'd the polyphant, not much unlike a lute, but strung with wire." The orpherion and theorbo were kinds of lute; the theorbo was a large one, mostly for the playing of grounds. We think the madrigal may have been a power of no trifling work in the refining of the English mind; for while the effect of some music may be the upstirring of the soul from rest and peace to action and contention, that of the old madrigal seems to be the soothing of it from contention, and eagerness, and roughness, to peace, and rest, and softness: and what it does time after time for an individual, while his ears listen to its flowing harmony, may at length remain a more abiding feeling of the better man; and what it may do for one man it may do at last by a like work on many 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 PHŒBUS broiling." of A quiet generation may choose a soothing music, and an age 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 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. 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 |