that execution was everything, composition little or nothing. He only anticipated the complaint of a later satirist who wrote:-- Spare, execution, spare thy victim's bones-- Composed by Mozart, decomposed by Jones. [Illustration: MANNERS AND CVSTOMS OF YE ENGLYSHE IN 1849 A FEW FRIENDS TO TEA AND A LYTTLE MVSYCK] [Sidenote: _"Punch's" Taste in Music_] [Illustration: TASTE IN 1854--VILLIKINS AND HIS DINAH IN THE DRAWING-ROOM YOUNG LADY (who ought to know better): "Now, William, you are not low enough yet. Begin again at 'he took the cold pizen.'"] Specimens of fashionable musical criticism have already been given under the head of opera. _Punch_ had the root of the matter in him but was lacking in technique, and confesses himself unable to make out what a critic meant by alluding to a new tenor's "admirable _portamento_." He was on much more sure ground when he attacked Balfe for mangling Beethoven at the Grand National Concerts at Her Majesty's Theatre in 1850, when trivial rubbish was sandwiched between movements of the _Eroica_ Symphony. A second visit, however, enabled him to withdraw his censure, as the _Eroica_ and C minor Symphonies were performed without being cut in two. _Punch_ had "no use for" Wagner, as we have seen, but he fully appreciated his romantic forerunner Weber; his salutation of Spohr and Hummel as classics was perhaps a trifle premature. The names of the various musical celebrities who figure in the pages of _Punch_ in this period afford a striking illustration of the transitoriness of the fame of the executant. Who but experts in musical biography know of Sivori and Ole Bull now? Even the laurels of the great Thalberg, the most "gentlemanly" of all the great pianists, author of the most fashionable variations, have withered sadly in the last half century. _Punch_ does not seem to have been specially impressed by Liszt, the greatest of them all, and misspells his name "Listz" on the occasion of a perfunctory reference to him in 1843. The favourite composers of waltzes were Strauss, the founder of the dynasty of the Viennese waltz-kings, and Labitzky. To the present generation the name Strauss has totally different associations; and we live so fast that an enlightened writer has recently declared that the once redoubtable Richard is also dead. It would be an overstatement to say that conductors were of no account in the 'forties and 'fifties, in view of the notoriety of Jullien and the prestige of Costa, who was both an autocrat and a martinet, but they did not loom nearly so large in the public eye as the great singers. The balance of repute has long since been decisively redressed and the popular conductor of to-day has no reason to complain of lack of homage, whether in the form of applause or official recognition. [Sidenote: _Turner as Painter and Poet_]