The rapid improvement of music in all its branches during the last century has been promoted mainly by the various societies, clubs, and other associations that have sprung up in the metropolis and many large cities, among which Norwich stands prominently; these have formed a bond of union between professional musicians and amateurs, mutually advantageous, by establishing among them a combination of talent and taste, that tends materially to cultivate the art to which they are attached. Norwich has produced many great minds, that have done much towards this work. In the last century the musical world were astonished by the wonderful precocity of the two young children, Hook and Crotch; the name of the former as notorious perhaps as much through the literary fame of his son Theodore, as for his own musical attainments. It is said that young Hook was able to play pieces at four years of age, and at six to perform a concerto at a concert, and to have composed the music for an opera with thirty-six airs, before he was eight years old. In the course of his life he is said to have written two thousand four hundred songs, one hundred and forty complete works or operas, one oratorio, and many odes and anthems. He died in 1813, leaving two sons, Dr. James Hook, the Dean of Worcester, who died 1828, and Theodore Edward Hook, the author. William Crotch, whose name has attained a wider celebrity, was also a native of the city, the son of a carpenter. His early displays of musical talent exceed in wonder even those of his fellow-citizen and co-temporary, Hook; and many curious anecdotes are related of its manifestation during his infancy. His father seems to have been a self-taught musician, who without any scientific knowledge had built himself an organ, upon which he had learned to play a few common tunes, such as “God save the King,” and “Let Ambition fire the mind.” About Christmas 1776, his child William, then only a year and a half old, was observed frequently to leave his food or play, to listen to his father, and would even then touch the key note of the tunes he wished to be played. Not long afterwards, a musical lady came to try the organ, and after her visit he seems to have made his first attempt to play a tune—her playing excited him to a painful degree, his mother describing him as so peevish that she could “do nothing with him.” Music had charms, however, to soothe his baby breast, and he consoled himself by picking out the air of “God save the King,” which in addition to being his father’s most frequent performance, had been also frequently sung as a lullaby by his maternal nurse. At this time he was _two years and three weeks old_, truly an infant prodigy! The report of his precocity gained little credence, until accident confirmed what had previously been deemed the exaggerations of parental fondness.