Then Tiny Tim had a song about a lost child travelling in the snow; the miner sang a Christmas song—‘it had been a very old song when he was a boy,’ while the man in the lighthouse (C.C.) consoled himself in his solitude with a ‘sturdy’ ditty. What was John Browdie's north-country song? (N.N.). All we are told is that he took some time to consider the words, in which operation his wife assisted him, and then
began to roar a meek sentiment (supposed to be uttered by a gentle swain fast pining away with love and despair) in a voice of thunder.
The Miss Pecksniffs used to come singing into the room, but their songs are unrecorded, as well as those that Florence Dombey used to sing to Paul, to his great delight. What was the song Miss Mills sang to David Copperfield and Dora
about the slumbering echoes in the cavern of Memory; as if she was a hundred years old.
When we first meet Mark Tapley he is singing merrily, and there are dozens of others who sing either for their own delight or to please others. Even old Fips, of Austin Friars, the dry-as-dust lawyer, sang songs to the delight of the company gathered round the festive board in Martin Chuzzlewit's rooms in the Temple. Truly Dickens must have loved music greatly himself to have distributed such a love of it amongst his characters.
It is not to be expected that Sampson Brass would be musical, and we are not surprised when on an occasion already referred to we find him
humming in a voice that was anything but musical certain vocal snatches which appeared to have reference to the union between Church and State, inasmuch as they were compounded of the Evening Hymn and ‘God Save the King.’
Whatever music he had in him must have been of a sub-conscious nature, for shortly afterwards he affirms that
the still small voice is a-singing comic songs within me, and all is happiness and joy.
His sister Sally is not a songster, nor is Quilp, though he quotes ‘Sally in our Alley’ in reference to the former. All we know about his musical attainments is that he