tired by the way he entered. Mrs. Atkins, on witnessing his departure, felt the return of her resolution. She was re-assured in her original belief in the impossibility of all spiritual visitations; she persuaded herself to believe the figure the work of some skilful impostor, and she determined on following its footsteps. She took up her chamber lamp, and hastened to put her design into execution. On reaching the door, to her infinite surprise, she discovered it to be fastened as she had herself left it on retiring to her bed. On withdrawing the bolt, and opening the door, she saw the back of the youth descending the staircase: she followed, till on reaching the foot of the stairs, the form appeared to sink into the earth.—It was in vain to attempt concealing the occurrences of the night; her voice, her manner, the impossibility of sleeping another night in the ill-omened chamber would necessarily betray that something of a painful and mysterious nature had occurred. The event was related to Lady Pennyman. She determined to remain no longer in her present habitation. The man, of whom the house had been engaged, was spoken to upon the subject. He became extremely violent, said that it was no time for the English to indulge their imaginations; insinuated something of the guillotine, and bade her, at her peril, to drop a single expression to the injury of his house. While she remained in France ;-no word was uttered upon the subject she framed an excuse for her abrupt departure: another residence was offered in the vicinity of Lisle, which she engaged on the pretext of its being better calculated to the size of her family, and at once relinquished her habitation, and with it every preternatural occasion of anxiety.

A LETTER ON MUSICAL TASTES.

MY DEAR

I fear you and I shall always remain at feud on the subject of music. I cannot be brought to like the highlywrought combinations of mechanical art in at all the same degree as the simple, natural, and touching strains of feeling and expression. I cannot put that which is only skilful, wonderful, and to be admired, into competition with what is to be loved and felt. In a word, I prefer, like Frank Osbaldistone, one simple song which I have loved in childhood "to all the opera airs which were ever minted in the capricious brain of an Italian Musical Doctor."

You have told me more than once that as I have no knowledge of music as a science, I have no right to talk of the relative merits of its different kinds. To this objection I never can subscribe. Music is meant for general delight, physical and mental. "All with ears and souls" have, in my view of the matter, a perfect right to hear, enjoy, discuss, condemn, and praise music and musicians all and sundry, from Mozart and Rossini at the Opera House, to the whistling of the pot-boy, as he goes along the street. Music being pleasing to none but a scientific listener, is, in my idea, strong argument, if not proof positive, that the music is bad. To say that none other are capable of judging it, I consider on a par with the celebrated declaration of the shoemaker, that the wearer of a boot could not know whether or not it pinched him, as he had not been brought up to the craft of Crispin.

It may at first sight appear paradoxical, but I hold it nevertheless to be true, that the greatest musical profi

cients are not those who derive the greatest gratification from music. They understand it very much, but they feel it very little. They are thoroughly versed in all the theories of bars, minims, quavers and crotchets, and they judge accurately whether the composer and the performer have shewn science and skill, but they seldom or never experience that full, floating, voluptuous delight which pervades the senses and the soul of a true lover of music. They admire a piece of music as I should a piece of clock-work or of lace-making, as a complex and difficult specimen of mechanical art-not as a natural object of natural gratification. To them may be truly applied the French term "faire de la musique.”—They do indeed "make" it-laboriously and as workmen make it.-but when do we hear from them those natural and spontaneous gushings of sound which rise, as it were, irrepressibly from the well-head of music within? They attend so much to its means that they overlook its end. They admire its body, but neglect its soul.

My first objection to a long, intricate, and difficult composition to what, in short, is usually called " a piece of music," is that it is almost always totally unmeaning. It expresses and it excites no passion-it is neither pensive nor enlivening-neither spirited nor sad. It is equally fit for a reveillé or a retreat-for a dirge or an epithalamium. Its sole object appears to be to display the composer's skill and the performer's execution. As it is inexpressive, so is it powerless. There may be much fine fingering, and many brilliant combinations— but there is nothing to soothe sadness, or excite mirthto touch, in short, any sentiment or sensation whatsoever. It does not call forth that mysterious and indefinable connection between physical sense and inward feeling, which has caused Music to be called the Poetry of Sound. The

ear may sometimes be gratified, but the heart remains wholly untouched. "A piece of music" is accordingly disrelished by all but conoscenti. It is only those who judge by the difficulties overcome, and not by the effect produced, that take pleasure in this kind of composition. One may remark a listless and uninterested air in nine tenths of the auditors during a performance of this sort, which is instantly changed into brightened eyes and lighted-up countenances, at the striking up of a simple and well-known air. There is even a kind of buz of delight perfectly distinguishable in a crowded audience, during the first bars of a popular tune. It comes home to the feelings of all with a suddenness and a strength which are quite apparent and delightful. It has, I believe, been observed before, and, at all events, it is strikingly true, that no music is very powerfully pleasing till it becomes familiar. Even that which is most beautiful never gives its full measure of gratification till we come to know it well. And where was ever the "piece of music" which was well known and strongly loved? Could the Swiss have wandered over the world with the score of a long divertimento burnt in upon their hearts like that of the Ranz des Vaches ?-Would a Highland regiment march to battle to any thing but a Highland pibroch ?—or would all the sonatas of all Italy, dead and alive, give rise to the least touch of that thrill which pervades the whole frame at the sound of an air which we have heard from loved lips, in long-past times and long-left places? I shall never forget what I felt at hearing a song sung by an indifferent and disagreeable person which I had last heard from one who was most dear, and who was lost to me for ever. It was a song which had been a pre-eminent favourite of both of us, and which I had been used to call, par excellence, hers. It

had always lived in the inmost fold of my heart. It had

ever been present to my ear, though I had held it too sacred to be breathed even by my own voice. You may conceive, then, my feelings at hearing it bleated forth, lightly and carelessly, like any mere boarding-school tune. I felt almost as if a personal injury had been inflicted on me. By degrees, however, my anger passed away, and sorrow followed. My heart rose in my throat, and I would have given any thing to have been alone that I might have wept unrestrainedly. When I went home, I wrote the following verses-I took care that their metre should not be suited to the air the casual hearing of which had given me so much pain :

I do not send these verses to you for the purpose of dosing you with my own poetry, but to ask you whether you think that the feelings which gave rise to them could