Wise as the serpent is the four feet of performer on the nearest approach to that instrument.
This was written when the serpent was practically extinct, but Dickens would be very familiar with the name of the instrument, and may have seen and heard it in churches in his younger days.
In referring to another boy's attempt at solving the arithmetical puzzles, he mentions the cymbals, combined with a faint memory of St. Paul.
I observe the player of the cymbals to dash at a sounding answer now and then rather than not cut in at all; but I take that to be in the way of his instrument.
In Great Expectations Mr. Wopsle, who is a parish clerk by profession, had an ambition not only to tread the boards, but to start off as Hamlet. His appearance was not a success, and the audience was derisive.
On his taking the recorders—very like a little black flute that had just been played in the orchestra and handed out at the door—he was called upon unanimously for ‘Rule Britannia.’
Reference has already been made to Bucket's music-shop, so we must not forget to visit Caleb Plummer's little room, where there were
scores of melancholy little carts which, when the wheels went round, performed most doleful music. Many small fiddles, drums, and other instruments of torture.
The old man made a rude kind of harp specially for his poor blind daughter, and on which Dot used to play when she visited the toy-maker's. Caleb's musical contribution would be ‘a Bacchanalian song, something about a sparkling bowl,’ which much annoyed his grumpy employer.
‘What! you're singing, are you?’ said Tackleton, putting his head in at the door. ‘Go it, I can't sing.’
Nobody would have suspected him of it. He hadn't what is generally termed a singing face, by any means.