Apropos of quartetts, it is related that His Most Catholic Majesty, Charles the Fourth, King of Spain, piqued himself not a little on his abilities as a violin-performer. Summer and winter, did this royal and reiterating practitioner perform, every morning, at six precisely, his _quatuor_, with three other violins; himself, of course, the violin _par excellence_: and, with the trifling drawbacks of missing his notes, and breaking his time (as if to mark his royal independence), he may indeed be said to have approved himself a king among fiddlers. Another quartett-player of the class which Flattery herself can scarcely help frowning at, was the late Sir William Hamilton, whose acquirements in other ways must have contrasted oddly enough with his feebleness as a fiddler. “Sir William Hamilton, who was now at an advanced age,” says Ferrari, in his gossipping book, “was a kind and good-humoured man; but he used to bore us with his performance on the _viola_, especially in Giardini’s quartetts, which I verily believe derived their greatest value in his eyes from the circumstance of Giardini’s having been his master.”—Doubtless, with all his amiable qualities, Sir William had something of the obstinacy which belongs so closely to evil-doers on stringed instruments; doubtless there was no deterring him from “the _un_even _tenor_ of his way.” The about-to-be subjoined _sestett_ of condemnatory lines is _not_ intended to apply to Sir William Hamilton (who had, at least, the merit of fostering Giardini), but, generally, to him who, having no sort of summons from Apollo, no musical vocation whatsoever from Nature, has persisted, nevertheless, to the end of his days, in being what is called a tormentor of catgut. A person of this peculiar turn of mistake, may be said to fright the fiddle from its propriety—for surely, in his hands, it wholly loses its temper and character. Making his fiddle-bow the stalking-horse of his vanity, he walks over the strings in an adagio, or curvets in an andante, with action that has nothing of the graceful, and much of the ludicrous. Such a being is in the extreme of the wrong. He hunts after a shadow: like Ixion, he embraces a cloud. His pursuit is frivolous, because it is without a chance of attaining its object. Unable to play in time, he is perpetually out of season: unable to stop in tune, he is ever in a false position. He wears out his existence in an unconscious dream; and his harsh discords and unpleasing sharps are as the _snoring_ thereof. He dies in a delusion; his ricketty crotchets and uneasy quavers are exchanged for one long _rest_; and here is the amount of his _value_, in six lines— ON AN AGED MUSICAL TRIFLER. The silly dilettante, who A thankless violin doth woo, Till _old_ he looks as Saturn, Can (to denote just what he _is_) No name receive so fit as this— A _spoon_, of _fiddle-pattern_.