great buoy, and then her feathering paddles,
dipping almost noiselessly into the sea,
she went away like a racehorse.

SUNDAY MUSIC.

THIS earth we live on is decidedly a very
curious place, and people do the most extraordinary
things upon it. 'Whatever is, is
right,' of course— the number of feet in
that line of the Essay on Man is certainly
correct—but still I can't help doubting
whether it be quite right to hate our brothers
and sisters quite as much as we do. It can't
be exactly a proper thing to take that which
does not belong to us, and cut the throats of
the legitimate proprietors, because they object
to our proceedings; to believe, (or say we
believe) that some hundred millions of our
fellow creatures are bound headlong to
perdition, because they believe rather more or
less than we believe. It may be right, but
it doesn't look like it, to send two honest
labourers to hard labour in a villanous jail
—to herd with Blueskin, Jack Rann, Bill
Sykes, and Mat-o'-the-Mint—for the
microscopic crime of leaving haymaking to see a
review; it oughtn't to be right that a
Christian priest, consecrated to God's service
for our soul's health, should, by virtue of his
commission of J.P., have the right to do a
shameful and cruel wrong. Let me only take
one little slender twig from one of the
fascines with which we are perpetually
fortifying our stronghold of assumed right or
wrong—one splinter of the yule log of
inconsistency — Music on Sundays.

And, mind, I am tolerant, I am moderate;
I am content to blink the general Sunday
question—Sunday and bitters, or Sunday and
sweetstuff. Meet me on this question: Is
secular music on Sundays right or wrong,
and are we inconsistent in our opinions and
acts concerning it?

I maintain that music is always good;
and better on our best of days, Sunday. I
shall not be long in finding antagonists who
will maintain that Sunday music is wrong,
dangerous, nay, damnable.

Now, why should secular Sunday music be
so dreadfully wicked?— or, again, admitting
momentarily, that it might not be quite correct,
why can't we be a little consistent in the
application of our strictures, remembering that
maxim so time-honoured (in the breach
thereof), that what is sauce for the goose is
(or should be) sauce for the gander likewise?
Did you never dwell, O ye denouncers
of Sunday music? in a provincial garrison
town? Did you never listen without wringing
of hands, or heaving of breasts, or
upturning of eyes, or quivering accents—but,
on the contrary, with much genial pleasure
and content—to the notes of the regimental
brass-band coming home with the regiment
from church? Was not that music of a
notoriously worldy, not to say frivolous
character, including marches, polkas, potpourris,
schottisches, valses-à-deux-temps, many of
which, by the self-same musicians, you heard
performed only last night at the Shire Hall
Ball, or the Dowager Lady Larkheel's Assembly?
And yet I never heard of an association
in a country town for putting down
regimental waltzes on Sundays; and I
decidedly never knew the poet's corner of a
country newpaper to be ornamented by such
a brimstone bard as he who empties his
penny phials of penny wrath upon the wind
instruments in Kensington Gardens. Tell
me, are there not scores of watering-places—
pious watering-places, the chosen villegiature
of serious old ladies with heavy
balances at their bankers—of evanglical young
ladies, whose lives are passed (and admirably,
too) in a circle of tracts, good books,
fleecy hosiery, beef tea, rheumatism, and bed-
ridden old ladies—of awakened bankers,
possessing private proprietary chapels, and
never—oh, never!—running away with the
cash-box—watering-places where pet parsons
are as plentiful as pet lapdogs, and every
quack, and every ignoramus, and every crack-
brained enthusiast can thump his tub and
think it is a pulpit—can blow his puny tin
trumpet and think it is the last trump?
Yet in these same watering-places I never
heard of denunciations of the cavalry band;
or very frequently the subscription band
charming the air with sweet sounds on Sunday
afternoons, on the pier or the parade,
the common or the downs. To come nearer
home, who has not heard of the Sunday band
playing upon the terrace of regal Windsor?
Was not that mundane music patronised by the
most immaculate, severely-virtuous of kings
—the pattern family-man, George the Third!
And who can err who copies George the Third?
And to come nearer, nearest home, see where
yon palace stands— that unsightly but expensive
lump of architecture in eruption—that
palace before which stand no unholy cabs (oh,
wicked Place du Caroussel that sufferest
cabs, omnibuses, citadines, Dame Blanches,
and voitures bourgeoises!)—in that palace
the sovereign necessarily dines every Sunday
when in town. Do you think Mr.
Anderson and the private band play
psalm-tunes while the royal family are at
dinner, indulge the royal ears with the
Old Hundredth between the courses, and
usher in the entries with the Evening Hymn?
Away, ye hypocrites! Go away, black men,
don't you come a-nigh us. You object to
Sunday strains when the music is out-door
—when it affords a rational, cheerful, innocent
amusement for the tens of thousands
of overworked humanity.

I do not consider myself to be altogether a
heathen, I have no sympathy for Fetish
rites, or for any form of Mumbo-Jumboism,
be that interesting ism found at Eldad, or
little Bethel, at Saint Trumpington's Cathedral,
or on the west coast of Africa. I am