In the first year of the nineteenth century began the triumphant career of John Braham, the first of the three great English tenor singers who successively adorned the ensuing hundred years. Braham was a good singer, but perhaps the most deplorable composer that ever successfully foisted his rubbish on a tasteless public. His "Death of Nelson" persists to the present day, for the justification of those who share Lord Chesterfield's musical opinions, and even that unpardonable mixture of sentimental slip-slop and half-hearted cock-a-doodle-doo seems to have been a comparatively favourable example of the compositions with which Braham regaled the London public during the early years of the century. The scene of his first triumphs was Covent Garden Theatre, where he was accustomed to appear in composite operatic entertainments, his own part being almost invariably written by himself. A few years after the London _début_ of Braham the penny-whistle melodies of Sir Henry Bishop sufficed to make him the most popular composer of the day. In 1810, when Bishop became director at Covent Garden, none of the institutions that have played an important part in the musical progress of the century as yet existed in this country. It is true the Festival of the Three Choirs had been held regularly for a very long time already. But there was no Philharmonic Society, no genuine opera, no Saturday and Monday popular concerts of chamber-music, no Academy or College of Music, no Crystal Palace or Hallé orchestra. The great choral associations, independent of Cathedral authorities, had not yet been formed, and England was far too much isolated from the rest of the world in regard to musical affairs. It is curious to note how precisely the downfall of Napoleon corresponds with the beginning of better things in the English musical world. Leipsic was fought in 1813, and earlier in that year--as though with a premonition that an era was at hand in which it would be possible to cultivate the arts of peace--a group of musicians assembled in London to discuss the formation of a Philharmonic Society. The event is of striking significance. Hitherto music had flourished only under the patronage of Lords Temporal and Spiritual; but the _souffle_ of the French Revolution had passed over the world, and it was time for music--which had put off the courtly periwig and the courtly graces, and had attained in Beethoven to the purely human standpoint--to be established on a broader basis. Let us give the worthy Bishop his due. A well-meaning person, if a trivial composer, he helped to found the London Philharmonic Society, which was the first society in Europe, and in the world, consciously formed for the furtherance of musical art and for no other purpose.