[Footnote 8: _British Musical Biography_, p. 62.] [Sidenote: =“Music Meetings”=] About the year 1680 the principal music-masters in London, perceiving an eagerness in the public for musical performances, caused a room to be erected in York Buildings and purposely fitted up for concerts, where the best compositions and performers of the time were to be heard. This was called the “music meeting,” and this room was for a long time the place where the lovers of music assembled at the benefit concerts of the most eminent professors of the art. [Sidenote: =Oxford Music School=] As regards the provinces, in 1665 a music school was founded at Oxford by the members of the old Oxford meetings which were suppressed during the Rebellion. Anthony Wood speaks of these meetings when King Charles was driven to Oxford. This new (1665) school, it is quaintly recorded, was furnished “with a number of instruments, including an organ of four stopps, and seven desks to lay the books on, at two shillings each.” Subscription concerts were given, and these Oxford gatherings were the first of which any account is to be met with, indeed they seem to have been the only association of the kind in the kingdom. (Hawkins, _History of Music_.) For the common and ordinary people there were entertainments suited to their notions of music; these consisted of concerts in unison, as they were called, of fiddles, hautboys, trumpets, etc., performed in booths at fairs held in and about London, but more frequently in certain places called music-houses, of which there were many in the time of King Charles II. Among the first of this kind was one known by the sign of the Mitre near the west end of St. Paul’s Cathedral. This was about the year 1664. The name of the master of this house was Robert Hubert, _alias_ Forges, who besides being a musician was a collector of natural curiosities. Another well-known place of this kind was in Stepney, where there was an organ and a band of fiddles and hautboys, and here at times dancing was allowed. [Sidenote: =Pepys’s Diary=] As quaintly casting light on the musical condition of things during this period, the following extracts from _Pepys’s Diary_ may be given:— “Oct. 1, 1667. To White Hall: and there in the Boarded Gallery did hear the musick with which the King is presented this night by Monsieur Grebus, the master of His musick; both instrumental (I think twenty-four viols.) and vocall; an English song upon Peace. But God forgive me! I never was so little pleased with a concert of musick in my life. The manner of setting words and repeating them out of order and that with a number of voices, makes me sick, the whole design of vocall musick being lost by it. Here was a great press of people, but I did not see many pleased with it, only the instrumental musick he had brought by practice to play very just.”