One of his few surviving contemporaries, speaking from a lifelong experience, described him with perfect
truth as an eccentric man of genius, who took more pains to avoid fame than others do to seek it.
His love of music was one of his earliest passions, and remained with him to the last. I cannot refrain from quoting some recollections of the late Archdeacon Groome, a friend of his College days, and so near a neighbour in later life that few letters passed between them. ‘He was a true musician; not that he was a great performer on any instrument, but that he so truly appreciated all that was good and beautiful in music. He was a good performer on the piano, and could get such full harmonies out of the organ that stood in one corner of his entrance room at Little Grange as did good to the listener. Sometimes it would be a bit from one of Mozart’s Masses, or from one of the finales of some one of his or Beethoven’s Operas. And then at times he would fill up the harmonies with his voice, true and resonant almost to the last. I have heard him say, “Did you never observe how an Italian organ-grinder will sometimes put in a few notes of his own in such perfect keeping with the air which he was grinding?” He was not a great, but he was a good composer. Some of his songs have been printed, and many still remain in manuscript. Then what pleasant talk I have had with him about the singers of our early years; never forgetting to speak of Mrs. Frere of
Downing, as the most perfect private singer we had ever heard. And so indeed she was. Who that had ever heard her sing Handel’s songs can ever forget the purity of her phrasing and the pathos of her voice? She had no particle of vanity in her, and yet she would say, “Of course, I can sing Handel. I was a pupil of John Sale, and he was a pupil of Handel.” To her old age she still retained the charm of musical expression, though her voice was but a thread. And so we spoke of her; two old men with all the enthusiastic admiration of fifty years ago. Pleasant was it also to hear him speak of the public singers of those early days. Braham, so great, spite of his vulgarity; Miss Stephens, so sweet to listen to, though she had no voice of power; and poor Vaughan, who had so feeble a voice, and yet was always called “such a chaste singer.” How he would roar with laughter, when I would imitate Vaughan singing
His hiddeus (sic) love provokes my rage,
Weak as I am, I must engage,
from Acis and Galatea. Then too his reminiscences of the said Acis and Galatea as given at the Concerts for Ancient Music. “I can see them now, the dear old creeters with the gold eye-glasses and their turbans, noddling their heads as they sang
O the pleasures of the plains!”
‘These old creeters being, as he said, the sopranos who had sung first as girls, when George the Third was king.
‘He was a great lover of our old English composers, specially of Shield. Handel, he said, has a scroll in his marble hand in the Abbey on which are written the first bars of
I know that my Redeemer liveth;