The harpsichord was indeed the centre of public music of orchestra and opera. Even after a race of virtuosi had pulled it to the fore as a brilliant solo instrument it still held its serviceable place in the orchestra. When in the course of time overtures became symphonies, it was still from the harpsichord that the conductor, usually the composer, led the performance of them. Gluck wished to banish it from the orchestra of the opera house; but, when Haydn came to London in 1790 and again in 1794 to lead a performance of his specially composed symphonies, he sat at the instrument which, more than any other, had assisted at the growth of independent instrumental music--at the harpsichord, now slowly but surely withdrawing into the background before the victorious pianoforte. It is easy to pick flaws in it, now that we can thunder it to silence with our powerful concert grands. It is natural to smile at its thin and none too certain sounds. It is difficult to imagine that the hottest soul of a musician-poet could warm away the chill of it. But what a place it held, and how inextricably is it woven with the development of nearly all the music that now seems the freest speech of passion and imagination! What men gave service to it: Domenico Scarlatti, François Couperin, and Rameau; great Bach and Handel; the sons of Bach, some of them more famous once than their father; and the child Mozart, with a dozen courts at worship of him! The music they wrote for it has come down to us; we hear it daily in our concert halls. Few will deny that it gains in beauty and speaks with richer voice through our pianoforte; but they who wrote it never heard it so; and we who hear it, hear it not as they. Even when by the efforts of some devoted student it is brought to performance upon the instrument which saw its birth, we cannot truly hear it as it sounded once. We listen, as it were, to an intruder hailing from the past, whose usurpation of our modern ears we tolerate because we are curious and because he is winning. With the wigs and powder, the breeches and slippers, the bows and elegancies, it has faded into the past. Its sound is dumb and its spirit is gone. II