If the Prince of Wales succeeds as well in popularising the study of music as his father did in popularising art, we may hope to see before long a great reformation in the morals of our own people; and the wandering German bands, composed of the worst players in their own country—where they would not presume to play in public—will no longer be tolerated in England, because the taste of the people will be educated above such wretched performances. Good music, then, everywhere is what is wanted to enable the lower classes to enjoy themselves rationally, and no better means of promoting the sobriety of a nation can be devised. The more the masses are leavened with a knowledge and love of music, the more indeed we imitate the Germans in this respect, the less necessity there will be for restrictive measures in the way of ‘local option,’ and the lighter and easier will be the work of temperance reformers. A great reform will have been effected. If music can charm savages and snakes, it can do much more for our toiling, amusement-lacking countrymen and countrywomen. The theatre is much patronised in Germany, the prices being cheap, the music good, and the performances fair. The play begins at seven, and ends about nine or half-past. Concerts, too, both instrumental and vocal, are frequent; every town has its Choral Society, and every district its Choral Union, so that there is never any lack of vocalists of both sexes for the performance of an oratorio or the celebration of any great occasion. Where a people is satisfied with simple pleasures, these can, of course, be provided at little cost. Children have their swings, climbing-poles, bowling alley, merry-go-rounds, horizontal bars, &c., in the public gardens; and when one sees groups of officers deeply interested in the game of dominoes, it does not cause so much surprise to witness a huge whirligig worked by horses or steam, where servant-maids and soldiers are driven round and round upon painted wooden horses to the enlivening strains of a barrel organ, aided by a cornet or two and the universal drum. This sort of affair is a great attraction to the masses, and being generally placed near a beerhouse, admiring friends sit round on benches with their beakers of frothy beer, their cigars or large pipes, waiting to take a turn on the machine after a time. Music everywhere seems to be the rule—there can never be too much of it to please the people. Wherever there is a company of soldiers marching along the road without a band at their head, they make up for the deficiency by singing popular melodies and martial songs, keeping time with their feet; and this always gives strangers a favourable impression of the hearty, happy, and even merry German soldier.