musicians with flute, violin, clarionet, and bass-viol, whom most of us have seen occupying the singing-gallery of some country church, are probably not inaccurate representatives of the band of minstrels who occupied the rood-lofts in mediæval times. In this period of the middle ages, indeed, music seems to have had a great charm for all classes of society, and each class appears in turn in the minstrel character in the illuminations of the manuscripts. Even the shepherds, throughout the middle ages, seem to have been musical, like the swains of Theocritus or Virgil; for we constantly find them represented playing upon instruments; and in confirmation we give a couple of goatherds (No. 130), from MS. Reg. 2 B. vii. fol. 83, of early fourteenth century date: they are playing on the pipe and horn. But, besides these instruments, the bagpipe was also a rustic instrument: there is a shepherd playing upon one on folio 112 of the same MS. (given in our cut No. 131): and again, in the early fourteenth century MS. Reg. 2 B. vi., on the reverse of folio 8, is a group of shepherds, one of whom plays a small pipe, and another the bagpipes. Chaucer (in the “House of Fame”) mentions-- _Pipes made of grene corne,_ _As han thise lytel herde gromes,_ _That kepen bestis in the bromes._ It is curious to find that even at so late a period as the reign of queen Mary, they still officiated at weddings and other merrymakings in their villages, and even sometimes excited the jealousy of the professors of the joyous science, as we have seen in the early French poem against the taborers. [Illustration: _No. 130. A Group of Shepherds._] [Illustration: _No. 131. A Bagpiper._] [Illustration: _No. 132. The Lady and Tambourine._] [Illustration: _No. 133. A Drummer._] I give next (cut No. 132) a representation of a female minstrel playing the tambourine; it is also taken from a MS. of the fourteenth century (MS. Reg. 2 B. vii. fol. 182). The earliest instance yet met with of the modern-shaped drum is contained in the Coronation Book of Richard II., preserved in the Chapter-house. Westminster, and is represented in the annexed cut (No. 133). This mediæval drummer is clearly intended to be playing on two drums at once; and, in considering their forms and position, we must make some allowance for the mediæval neglect of perspective. [Illustration: _No. 134. Blowing the Trumpet and Playing on the Cymbals._]