anxiety to which the exclusiveness of the book-wedded state would be liable; not to mention the impossibility of other people's having any literary offspring from our fair unique, and consequently of the danger of loving any compilations but our own. Really if we could burn all other copies of our originals, as the Roman Emperor once thought of destroying Homer, this system would be worth thinking of. If we had a good library, we should be in the situation of the Turks with their seraglios, which are a great improvement upon our petty exclusivenesses. Nobody could then touch our Shakespeare, our Spenser, our Chaucer, our Greek and Italian writers. People might say, "Those are the walls of the library!" and "sigh, and look, and sigh again;” but they should never get in. No Retrospective rake should anticipate our privileges of quotation. Our Mary Woolstonecrafts and our Madame de Staëls, —no one should know how finely they were lettered, what soul there was in their disquisitions. We once had a glimpse of the feelings which people would have on these occasions. It was in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. The keeper of it was from home; and not being able to get a sight of the Manuscript of Milton's "Comus," we were obliged to content ourselves with looking through a wire work, a kind of safe, towards the shelf on which it reposed. How we winked, and yearned, and imagined we saw a corner of the all-precious sheets, to no purpose! The feelings were not very pleasant, it is true; but then as long as they were confined to others, they would of course only add to our satisfaction.

But to come to our extract; for not being quite recovered yet from our late ill-health, we mean to avail ourselves of it still. It is remarkable, as the Reviewer has observed, for "a wonderful power over the resources of our

language." The original is in the "Prolusions of Strada," where it is put into the mouth of the celebrated Castiglione, as an imitation of the style of Claudian. From all that we recollect of that florid poet, the imitation, to say the least of it, is quite as good as any thing in himself. Indeed, as a description of the niceties of a musical performance, we remember nothing in him that can come up to it. But what will astonish the reader, in addition to the exquisite tact with which "Strada" is rendered by the translator, is his having trebled the whole description, and with an equal minuteness in his exuberance. We cannot stop to enter into the detail of the enjoyment, as we would; and indeed we should not know perhaps how to express our sense of it but by repeating his masterly niceties about the "clear unwrinkled song," the "warbling doubt of dallying sweetness," the "ever-bubbling spring," the kindling of the bird's

"soft voice

In the close murmur of a sparkling noise,"

the "quavering coyness," with which the musician "tastes the strings," the "surges of swoln rhapsodies," the "fullmouthed diapason swallowing all ;" and, in short, the whole "pride, pomp, and circumstance" of masterly playing, from its lordly sweep over the full instrument to the "capering cheerfulness" of a guitar accompaniment. The man of letters will admire the power of language; and to the musician and other lovers of music we are sure we are affording a great treat. Numbers of them will never have found their sensations so well analyzed before. Part of the poetry, it is true, is in a false and overcharged taste; but in general the exuberance is as true as it is surprising, for the subject is exuberant and requires it.

We should observe, before the concert begins, that

Castiglione is represented by Strada as having been present at this extraordinary duel himself; and however fabulous this may seem, there is a letter extant from Bartolomeo Ricci to Giambattista Pigna, contemporaries of Tasso, in which he says, that Antoniano, a celebrated improvisatore of those times, playing on the lute after a rural dinner which the writer had given to his friends, provoked a nightingale to contend with him in the same manner. Dr. Black, in his "Life of Tasso," by way of note upon this letter, quotes a passage from Sir William Jones, strongly corroborating such stories; and indeed, when we know what parrots and other birds can do, especially in imitating and answering each other, and hear the extravagant reports to which the powers of the nightingale have given rise, such as the story of an actual dialogue in Buffon, we can easily imagine that the groundwork of the relation may not be a mere fable. "An intelligent Persian," says Sir William, “declared he had more than once been present, when a celebrated lutanist, surnamed Bulbul (the nightingale), was playing to a large company in a grove near Shiraz, where he distinctly saw the nightingales trying to vie with the musician; sometimes warbling on the trees, sometimes fluttering from branch to branch, as if they wished to approach the instrument, and at length dropping on the ground in a kind of ecstasy, from which they were soon raised, he assured me, by a change in the mode."

MUSIC'S DUEL.

Now westward Sol had spent the richest beams
Of noon's high glory, when hard by the streams
Of Tiber, on the scene of a green plat,
Under protection of an oak, there sat
A sweet lute's-master: in whose gentle airs
He lost the day's heat and his own hot cares.
Close in the covert of the leaves there stood

A nightingale, come from the neighbouring wood;
(The sweet inhabitant of each glad tree,
Their muse, their syren, harmless syren she)
There stood she list'ning, and did entertain
The music's soft report: and mould the same
In her own murmurs, that whatever mood
His curious fingers lent, her voice made good:
The man perceiv'd his rival and her art,
Dispos'd to give the light-foot lady sport
Awakes his lute, and 'gainst the fight to come
Informs it, in a sweet præludium

Of closer strains; and ere the war begin,

He lightly skirmishes on every string,

Charg'd with a flying touch: and straightway she
Carves out her dainty voice as readily,
Into a thousand sweet distinguish'd tones,

And reckons up in soft divisions,

Quick volumes of wild notes; to let him know
By that shrill taste, she could do something too.
His nimble hands' instinct then taught each string
A cap'ring cheerfulness, and made them sing
To their own dance; now negligently rash

He throws his arm, and with a long-drawn dash
Blends all together; then distinctly trips
From this to that; then quick returning skips
And snatches this again, and pauses there.
She measures every measure, everywhere
Meets art with art; sometimes, as if in doubt,
Not perfect yet, and fearing to be out,
Trails her plain ditty in one long-spun note,
Through the sleek passage of her open throat,
A clear unwrinkled song; then doth she point it
With tender accents, and severely joint it
By short diminutives, that being rear'd
In controverting warbles evenly shar'd,

With her sweet self she wrangles. He amaz'd
That from so small a channel should be rais'd
The torrent of a voice, whose melody
Could melt into such sweet variety,

Strains higher yet, that tickled with rare art
The tattling strings (each breathing in his part)
Most kindly do fall out; the grumbling base
In surly groans disdains the treble's grace :

The high-perch'd treble chirps at this, and chides, Until his finger (moderator) hides

And closes the sweet quarrel, rousing all

Hoarse, shrill, at once; as when the trumpets call
Hot Mars to th' harvest of death's field, and woo
Men's hearts into their hands: this lesson too
She gives him back; her supple breast thrills out
Sharp airs, and staggers in a warbling doubt
Of dallying sweetness, hovers o'er her skill,
And folds in wav'd notes, with a trembling bill,
The pliant series of her slippery song ;
Then starts she suddenly into a throng

Of short thick sobs, whose thund'ring volleys float,
And roll themselves over her lubric throat

In panting murmurs, still'd out of her breast.
That ever-bubbling spring, the sugar'd nest

Of her delicious soul, that there does lie
Bathing in streams of liquid melody;
Music's best seed-plot, where, in ripen'd airs,
A golden-headed harvest fairly rears

His honey-dropping tops, plow'd by her breath
Which there reciprocally laboureth.

In that sweet soil, it seems a holy choir,
Founded to th' name of great Apollo's lyre,
Whose silver roof rings with the sprightly notes
Of sweep-lipp'd angel-imps, that swill their throats
In cream of morning Helicon, and then

Prefer soft anthems to the ears of men,

To woo them from their beds, still murmuring That men can sleep while they their matins sing: (Most divine service) whose so early lay

Prevents the eye-lids of the blushing day!

There you might hear her kindle her soft voice
In the close murmur of a sparkling noise,
And lay the ground-work of her hopeful song,
Still keeping in the forward stream, so long
Till a sweet whirlwind (striving to get out)
Heaves her soft bosom, wanders round about,
And makes a pretty earthquake in her breast,
Till the fledg'd notes at length forsake their nest,
Fluttering in wanton shoals, and to the sky,
Wing'd with their own wild echoes, prattling fly.
She opes the floodgate, and lets loose a tide