We will not follow out Dibdin’s professional career. The biographical dictionaries and his own works tell of his struggles, his ups and downs, his reverses and his triumphs. We rather care to look at him in some of his picturesque moments. We seem to see and to hear him when we look in at St. Bride’s--a mere lad, playing the congregation out with such exquisite power, that instead of departing, they remained to listen. We seem to see the young fellow’s enraptured look when he first heard the crash of an overture. What emotion there must have been in the young soul when he discovered that from simply hearing the combination and working of sounds in that overture, he had grasped the secret of composition; and later, on returning home from some grand musical banquet, he could write out the whole score from memory, with very few errors indeed. It was only natural after Dibdin had composed a great part of the music to ‘Love in the City,’ and to ‘Lionel and Clarissa’--as we write the words, Tom Cooke’s manly voice seems to fill the house with ‘I’ll love thee ever dearly!‘--it is natural, we say, that ‘Charley’ should find himself growing famous. We find him in strange company the year after ‘Lionel and Clarissa’ was produced. Perhaps the last place in which one would expect to find Dibdin is, not indeed with Dr. Johnson, but in Boswell’s life of the erudite savage. Boswell had composed a ‘little epigrammatical song’ which, he says, he was ‘volatile enough’ to repeat to Johnson, adding, ‘that Garrick had, a few days before, got it set to music by the ingenious Mr. Dibdin.’ This was in 1769, when Charles was four-and-twenty; and this is what he had to go to work upon:-- A MATRIMONIAL THOUGHT. In the blithe days of honeymoon, With Kate’s allurements smitten, I lov’d her late, I lov’d her soon, And call’d her, ‘dearest kitten!’ But now my kitten’s grown a cat, And cross, like other wives; Oh, by my soul, my honest Mat, I fear she has nine lives! Doubtless, Dibdin’s music was better than Boswell’s words--it could not be worse. Johnson confined himself simply to literary criticism. ‘My illustrious friend,’ Boswell remarks, said, “It is very well, sir, but you should not swear.” Upon which, I altered “Oh by my soul” to “Alas, alas!”’