surrender himself to its influences; in a word, when there is nothing else demanding his attention. The most barbarous of the practices of royalty and civic magnificence is that of employing music as an accompaniment to feasts. It involves a confusion of the realm of the real and ideal, and of one sense with another, as childish as that of the little girl who took out a peach to eat while bathing in the sea. Next to music during the dinner-time comes music in the midst of a cheerful evening party, where, when every intellect present is strung up to the note of animated conversation and brilliant repartee, there is a sudden _douche_ of solemn chords from the region of the pianoforte, and presently some well-meaning gentleman endeavors to lift up all the lazy people, who are lounging in easy-chairs after a good dinner, into the empyrean of emotion “sublime upon the seraph wings of ecstasy” of Beethoven or Mozart; or some meek damsel, with plaintive note, calls on them, in Schubert’s _Addio_, to break their hearts at the memory or anticipation of those mortal sorrows which are either behind or before every one of us, and which it is either agony or profanation to think of at such a moment. All this is assuredly intensely barbarous. The same people who like to mix up the ideal pleasure of music with incongruous enjoyments of another kind would be guilty of giving a kiss with their mouths full of bread and cheese. As to what we may term extra-mural music, the hideous noises made by the aid of vile machinery in the street, it is hard to find words of condemnation strong enough for it. Probably the organ-grinders of London have done more in the last twenty years to detract from the quality and quantity of the highest kind of mental work done by the nation than any two or three colleges of Oxford or Cambridge have effected to increase it. One mathematician alone, as he informed the writer, estimated the cost of the increased mental labor they have imposed upon him and his clerks at several thousand pounds’ worth of first-class work, for which the State practically paid in the added length of time needed for his calculations. Not much better are those church bells which now sound a trumpet before the good people who attend “matins” and other daily services at hours when their profane neighbors are wearily sleeping or anxiously laboring at their appointed tasks.