THE PROSPECTS OF THE PROFESSION. People tell us we are making great strides in music. So we are: just the sort of stride that a man makes in crossing a gutter too broad for his stretch, and into which he of course splashes. We are overdoing the thing. Nowadays every father is not content with informing his neighbour of the pleasing fact that his two-year-old child can articulate pa-pa; but that his little mirror of infantine precocity can play a symphony of Beethoven. All children are prodigies in the present age. They are all Infant Thalias or Infant Sapphos. Every young gentleman and every young lady is a prodigy of an amateur. All the middle-aged people are connoisseurs, and, as to the old folks, who are always the laudatores temporis acti, they are all judges-a set of Daniels come to judgment, whom nothing pleases but what is like themselves-very old and very grunty. As to the poor profession, it is crammed-crammed to suffocation. Formerly when a lad was too stupid to enter either of the learned callings, he used to be sent into the navy-for which the navy, I presume, felt proportionably grateful; but now, the blockhead of the family is made to learn music, and is started off to the Royal Academy. This is really making music a sort of national common sewer, to carry off the slush and lees of the population. The profession is like a Dutch herring-barrel, in which we are all packed with our tails most unamicably turned towards each other's heads to mark the little amity and unity there exists among us; and so crowded are we, and so jammed and jostled against one another that the Black Hole at Calcutta must have been baby-work to our sufferings. The result of all this is, that every imaginable "dodge" is resorted to for the purpose of attracting popularity, and to acquire a mere subsistence. "New effects," are tried,-to be laid aside when it is found that they produce" no effects," at the banker's. Difficult harmonic combinations are sought after, only to prove that the most difficult harmonic combination is the combining harmoniously the cries of one's children for bread, with the means of satisfying those cries. New instruments are invented to give greater scope for the existence of old professors; but were all the instruments that were ever puffed through, or scraped, or twanged, to be revived, the supply of instrumentalists (in political economy phrase) would increase beyond the demand, and we should be, as the sergeant says, "as we was, before we were as we was." Emigration might do something. But, alas! where are we to emigrate to? Shall we put our fiddles in their bags, our flutes in our pockets, or sling our harps over our shoulders, and go fiddle to the Chippewas, or Cut-awa's, or Fake-awa's? We are a done race, are we poor " musicianers." "The day of our destiny's over, and the star of our fate has declined." We have nothing for it but to go weep like stricken deer, while nobody seems to care a pin, so long as their withers are unwrung. Something must be done. Some plan must be struck out that shall arrest the dozing attention of the public, and relieve our pressing necessities. It must be something that shall astonish. For myself, I intend to stand on my head and play my pandeans in that position. To any body of a speculative turn, I recommend the idea of balancing his harp on his chin, and in that way executing a fantasia to be called, "Les souvenirs des delices d'un bon diner d'autrefois." Let another strap his violin behind his back, and there try the effect of a pizzicato; or let him undertake to give a sonata not on one string, but on no strings at all. That man must have been a genius who used to go about the streets playing the drum with one hand, and an organ with the other, having cymbals between his knees, the pandeans at his mouth, and the bells on his head, while he jingled the triangle with one elbow-and did nothing with the other. He wanted only one thing to complete him— the clarionet at his nose. Where is this man? What has become of him? If he is dead, there is an opening for some of us. Will nobody seize it? The last-mentioned mode of performance-the playing the clarionet through the nose-is becoming exceedingly popular, and takes wonderfully. Let somebody try it: this branch of the profession is not yet overstocked. The double drums may be worked by the feet for novelty's sake ; and the cymbals might be rendered most effective, by placing the two parts on the heads of two persons, and making them butt at each other at the proper times. If all this won't create a sensation-I DON'T KNOW WHAT WILL. MAY. 1. UPON a bright and balmy day, The flow'rs around were springing; The trouts did leap, the herds did low, A lassie fair was maying. 2. The blackbird piped so loud and clear, The thrush the air was filling, Above a floating downy cloud, The heaven-ward lark was trilling; And loudly did the cuckoo call, That pretty lassie singing. 3. Adown the vale a zephyr flew, Stood quietly to listen. 4. "Here are nodding cowslips meet For my little brother, For my own dear mother. A necklace of these daisies." 5. I've Pasta heard and Bartleman, Persiani and Rubini; Sontag, Grisi, Malibran, Lablache and Tamburini : But though their voices rich and clear Set all the town a-ringing, Far sweeter fell upon mine ear That little lassie's singing. MONOMANIACS AND MONOMANIA. Pudor, inquit, te malus angit, Insanis qui inter vereare insanus haberi. HORAT. To define true madness, what is 't but to be nothing else but mad. HAMLET. We are on the eve of a great change in our criminal jurisprudence, as respects the treatment of the insane; and if the clamour is to be trusted, with which its wiseacreship the public demands the punishment of such unfortunates as its own neglect suffers to go at large, when they ought to be under the guardianship of keepers, some very sanguinary code is about to be promulgated. It is not for us to question the general policy of hanging all those nobodies, sane or insane, who may stand in the way of society, and with whom society knows not what else to do. The rope is an heroic remedy, that saves a vast deal of thinking; and it has from the remotest times been the panacea of English state-doctors. The scaffold, too, is the great national pulpit, from which morality has long been taught by example; and the debtor's door, from the time of old Fortescue, has been universally deemed the best stoical college for the dissemination, among the youth of the metropolis, of spirit, courage, and a contempt of death. If, moreover, it is nothing but sound political economy to buy in the cheapest markets, Jack Ketch works on much lower terms than the Hanwell Asylum. It may indeed seem, if not the very height of injustice, at least to be a strange inconsistency in the nation, to punish capitally the insane, when it thinks hanging too good for all who presume to be wiser than their neighbours; and when it actually visits with all sorts of vituperation and hard usage, the wretch who gets ahead of his age, and refuses to howl with the wolves, and jabber with the monkeys of the human species. But with this we have nothing to do that is to say, nothing officially for if we were to take upon ourselves the character of missionaries, and interfere with the venerable prejudices of society, by reading great moral lessons, should we not disturb the tranquillity of our subscribers, and would not a diminished sale convict us of the error of our ways, in a form at once the most startling and the most disagreeable? Besides, are there not the two houses of Parliament, the anti-corn-law league, the church (Puseyite and Calvinistic), mechanic's and polytechnic institutions without number, the stage, and the daily journals, all rivalling each other in the great work of "insensing" the people? and are we not going to have national schools in every parish, for the purpose of teaching the operatives, on the most comprehensive plan, to starve in peace, and to obey without a murmur all and sundry that are placed in authority over them-quand même, as the French say, which we would not undertake to translate? There is small need then for the New Monthly to scatter firebrand truths; and less hope of its still, small voice making itself heard, amid the din of these multifarious best possible teachers. If hanging is to become the fashion of the day, we, as journalists, have nothing to do with the law but to obey it; always taking the best care we can for ourselves, of whatever poor modicum of wits the gods may have bestowed on us; so that, though all the pasties in the world should fall* we may not be hanged for lunacy,-whatever other link in the chain of patibulary causation we may unluckily stumble over. There is, however, one consideration involved in the settlement of the treatment of lunatics, which we are, as we conceive, justified in noticing, because it touches at once the self-interest and the vanity of all mankind; we allude to the way in which every individual may be liable to be affected with it. There is nothing which predisposes men to listen patiently to a long yarn so thoroughly, as talking to them about themselves and their own affairs; and surely it is no uninteresting question to ask our readers, how they would like to he hanged (in propriâ personá videlicet) merely for travelling out of the record of their wits, and for being driven to certain peccadilloes by the pressure of disease, which other persons commit under the instigation of the devil. It is not merely that in the stoical sense, was appwv paiverai, that every error of judgment is to be deemed a madness, nor that "we all know what we are, but know not what we may be." Monomania has become every man's business, since it has been discovered to be more epidemic than the influenza, and that it would not be too much to change the old maxim of quot homines tot sententiæ, into quot homines tot hallucinationes. Before, therefore, society proceeds to legislate for the cure of the insane, would it not be wise to have a new census of the people taken ad hoc, and to determine the numbers and categories of those to whom our legislation must apply? This taking of stock is the more necessary, since we must by this time be tolerably well convinced, that the legal mode of proceeding by definition leads but into a labyrinth of error. Without going to the expense of a jury de lunatico inquirendo, it will not be difficult to discover, that the biggest wig in court only the more methodically misses the matter, when he brings the whole battery of his wits to play on a subject of which he is entirely ignorant. On this account we prefer Polonius to Lord Hale; and have placed his definition at the head of the paper, as the safer guide to a sound conclusion. We are wrong, however, in saying that the big wigs, in common with their neighbours, are ignorant merely of the subject, when, in truth, they are prejudiced: for though they may not have studied it in a lunatic asylum, they have most of them, more or less, frequented the theatre, and are familiar with the stage-representations of the infirmity. This false experience has helped them to a few positive notions, which prevent them from believing in any form of insanity, that does not stamp and rave like King Lear, or let down its long hair, like the prima donna in almost every modern opera, since madness has become an obligato posthouse on the lyric road, to matrimony or a coffin. De Begnis, it has been said, studied his mad scenes in the Agnese from personal observation in a madhouse; but even he was obliged to follow the text of the poet; and poets are plaguy bad judges" of matters of fact, as well as of philosophy. Under no circumstances, therefore, 66 * Si fructus illabatur orbis |