FRANCIS HACKWOOD, whose convivial and entertaining qualities assisted his professional talent, in procuring for him the notice and support of the most influential among the patrons of music, was born in 1734. He attained some distinction among violin-performers; but the play of his wit and humour seems to have outlasted that of his instrument, in the impression produced—and no wonder, considering how much farther _wit_ can be transmitted, than _sound_. It is one of the anecdotes related of this artist, that, at the conclusion of an Evening Concert given by Lord Hampden to a large assemblage of rank and fashion, when the performers had been taxed to exert themselves till a most unreasonable hour in the morning, his Lordship addressed to him the question, “Hackwood, will you stay and _sup_ with us?”—and that the answer was, “No, my Lord, I can’t; for I think (taking out his watch) my wife must be waiting _breakfast_ for me.”—In another anecdote, Hackwood figures as the _cause_ of a jest, which is the next good thing to being its utterer. He was intimate with the late Sir C——r W——e, a Lincolnshire Baronet of large fortune, who, when not laid up by the gout, was a man of three-bottle capacity. At a gentlemen’s party given by this free votary of the grape, Hackwood, who had some pressing business to transact early in the ensuing day, and had heard the clock strike one, arose to depart. “Where are you going so soon?” inquired Sir C——r. “Home, Sir,” replied Hackwood; “it has struck one.”—“_One!_” exclaimed the Baronet; “pooh, pooh! Sit down, sit down! What’s _one_, among _so many_?”—Parke, the oboist, who gives this story, spoils the close of it by a bottle of Hollands gin, which he makes the two interlocutors to have drunk out between them, on the stairs, _pour prendre congé_. The gin lends no genuine spirit to the anecdote, and had better have been omitted by the narrator, who, besides, was probably in error as to its existence at all in the case. The man who, flushed with generous wine, has succeeded in saying a tolerably good thing, may fairly be considered as too _happy_, to be in any need of such extra stimulus as half a bottle of gin. Potation of _that_ character is the resource of the _dull_. Parke has alluded generally, in no liberal temper, to the eccentricities of this professor, whose disposition he has mistaken, when attributing _meanness_ to it. This charge he founds particularly on the fact of Hackwood’s having once shouldered his own violoncello (for he played that instrument also) on his way home from Apsley-House, to save expense of coach or porter, though he was himself attired “in an elegant suit of blue silk and silver.” Those who knew him better, could have furnished his detractor with a fairer reason for the proceeding in question, by suggesting that it arose from that anxious care for the safety of his instrument, which many a performer is well known to entertain, and which, in the instance of the individual now