Climate, and the national habits of life, have in England presented no light obstacles to the progress and well-being of the musical art, as collectively regarded. The fogs and lazy vapours that so oft obscure, in our dear country, the genial face of the sun, must needs check and chill our animal spirits, and beat back into the heart the feelings that else would seek fellowship with the ear, by uttering the language of sweet sounds. The eager pursuit of business, on the other hand—the continuity of _action_, rigorously self-imposed, in order to satisfy both our material wants and our ambition—leaves us little opportunity—even when our sky and our land are _not_ mutually frowning and exchanging sullen looks—for the liberation and development of our half-stifled musical impulses. The consequence of this two-fold opposition is—in multitudinous instances—that the music which is _in_ us, comes not _out_; and hence it happens that we are too often suspected, by foreigners, of organic deficiency in this matter, and too often induced to doubt of ourselves. With the luxurious climate, however, and the leisurely life, that combine to make the people of _Italy_ as vocal as grasshoppers, _we_, too, should burst forth into the raptures of song, and overflow with melodial honey;—_so_ at least I venture to believe, when I think of our stock, actually _hived_, in the way of _glees_ and _ballads_—a not contemptible little store. In addition to the two sources of impediment just noticed, may we venture to glance at a third? There is another gloom, besides that of our skies, that has had its obstructive influence, and still, in _some_ degree, retains it. England, happily for her own comfort, has now left far behind her those puritanic days wherein all persons who ministered to the _amusement_ of their fellow-beings were stigmatized as the “_caterpillars_ of a common-wealth,” and found law and opinion alike arrayed against them;—but the spirit of Puritanism, once so tyrannically exclusive, has never since departed wholly from among us—and we have, to this day, many sincere and well-meaning compatriots, whose peculiar notions of what constitutes piety, lead them to look with distrust and suspicion upon all that is beautiful in Nature or in Art, and so, to consider musical talent rather as a snare to be shunned, than as a resource to be cherished. These movers-in-a-mist, and extra-burden-bearers, confounding into _one_ the two ideas of cultivation and corruption, as if the terms were synonymous, refuse all countenance to music, as an _art_. Its secular forms, in particular, are their aversion; for they have a strong impression that music is then, _only_, in its right place, when directly employed in the service of the sanctuary. They discover, even in an _Oratorio_, copious matter for reprobation. They have no sympathy with the practice of the sweetly majestic Psalmist of Israel, who brought together, to aid in the