There is no prettier story in the history of Music than this; and what a loving, loveable, happy creature must he have been who could thus in his old age have related it!
CHAPTER CXCV.
ANOTHER LESSON WITH THE STORY AND MANNER OF ITS PRODUCTION.
Οὐδεὶς ἐρεῖ ποθ᾽, ὡς ὑπόβλητον λόγον,
———ἔλεξας, ἀλλὰ τῆς σαυτῦ φρενός.
SOPHOCLES.
Master Mace has another lesson which he calls Hab-Nab; it “has neither fugue, nor very good form,” he says, “yet a humour, although none of the best;” and his “story of the manner and occasion of Hab-Nab's production,” affords a remarkable counterpart to that of his favourite lesson.
“View every bar in it,” he says, “and you will find not any one Bar like another, nor any affinity in the least kind betwixt strain and strain, yet the Air pleaseth some sort of people well enough; but for my own part, I never was pleased with it; yet because some liked it, I retained it. Nor can I tell how it came to pass that I thus made it, only I very well remember, the time, manner, and occasion of its production, (which was on a sudden,) without the least premeditation, or study, and merely accidentally; and, as we use to say, ex tempore, in the tuning of a lute.
“And the occasion, I conceive, might possibly contribute something towards it, which was this.