who without any scientific knowledge had built himself an organ, upon which he had learned to play a few common tunes, such as “God save the King,” and “Let Ambition fire the mind.” About Christmas 1776, his child William, then only a year and a half old, was observed frequently to leave his food or play, to listen to his father, and would even then touch the key note of the tunes he wished to be played. Not long afterwards, a musical lady came to try the organ, and after her visit he seems to have made his first attempt to play a tune—her playing excited him to a painful degree, his mother describing him as so peevish that she could “do nothing with him.” Music had charms, however, to soothe his baby breast, and he consoled himself by picking out the air of “God save the King,” which in addition to being his father’s most frequent performance, had been also frequently sung as a lullaby by his maternal nurse. At this time he was two years and three weeks old, truly an infant prodigy! The report of his precocity gained little credence, until accident confirmed what had previously been deemed the exaggerations of parental fondness.
His father’s employer, passing the house at a time when the elder Crotch was absent from work on the plea of indisposition, heard the organ, and fancied that his workman was idle instead of ill; to convince himself, he went in, and found little Master William
performing, and his brother blowing the bellows. The marvel spread, and attracted such crowds of auditors, that from that time the hours of his performance were obliged to be limited. As he grew older his musical attainments rapidly increased, while at the same time he discovered symptoms of a genius for drawing, almost equal to that which he had already displayed for music.
When he was twelve years old he did the duty of organist at several chapels in Cambridge, whence he removed to Oxford, with a view to entering the church; but he afterwards resumed the musical profession, and was appointed organist of Christ Church, in 1790. In 1797, he became professor of music in that university; and in 1799, obtained the degree of doctor of music. On the establishment of the Royal Academy, in 1823, he was nominated Principal of that institution, but retired from the office before his death. Dr. Crotch’s great work is the oratorio of “Palestine,” the poetry of which is the prize poem of Bishop Heber. He was also the author of several anthems, and other pieces of sacred music.
His death occurred suddenly, at the dinner-table, on the 29th of September, 1847, in the seventy-third year of his age, at the residence of his son, the Rev. W. R. Crotch, Master of the Grammar School at Taunton, where he had spent the later years of his life.
There are two points worthy of notice connected
with the name and works of this great man. The country has raised no monument in any of its cathedrals or churches to his memory, and his greatest work, “Palestine,” is an oratorio almost entirely neglected. May it not be possible for the “Old City” that gave him birth to set an example to the rest of the musical world, by attention to these facts?
Most of the leading minds whose zeal and energy directed the earlier movements of the various musical societies in this district, are yet among the living, and the natural dictates of refinement cause us to shrink from any attempts at their biographies; it is, therefore, with the deference due to real genius, which needs no praise, that we pass in silence over the names of the most earnest promoters of the growth and cultivation of music, especially as developed in the workings of the Festival Committee, and its important adjunct, the Choral Society. The names and fame of Sir George Smart and Mr. Edward Taylor, professor of music at Gresham College, are already too much the property of the world at large to be reckoned among those whose privacy might be invaded by comment in these pages; but there are many more, who with them, may from the centre of that magnificent hall, and the midst of the greatest triumphs of music that have ever been achieved by its almost unrivalled choruses and orchestra, feel that “for their monument we must look around.”
And now it might seem but just and right that among the lions of the “Old City” we should find a place for the manifold ecclesiastical structures still surviving the downfall of “superstition,” and retaining their legitimate right, as houses of worship. To do justice to the antiquities or beauties that abound among them is a task beyond our powers, or the limit of such a work as this; their traceries, their curiously cut flint work, old carvings, rood lofts, chambers of sanctuary within, and heaped-up grave-yards without, verily burying the pathways of the streets, they line in such close succession—their monuments and epitaphs, quaint, grim, chaste, and uncouth; their steeples, spires, and towers, round, square, buttressed and bare—their bells musical and grand, cracked and jangling—their roofs slated, tiled, leaded, patched, perfect, or crumbling—their names and saintships a labyrinth of mystery in themselves—would it not fill a volume alone to chronicle even their leading features, to say nought of the changes they have undergone, the barter among goods and chattels, the chopping and changing, and massacres in the painted glass departments,—part of an Abraham and his ass left in a St. Andrews, the other portions transported to the windows of St. Stephens; of the ghostly outlines left of old brasses torn up and melted down by Puritan soldiers and coppersmiths—or the legends that hang about their shrines and mutilated images? We dare
not venture upon the well-beaten track of archæologians, topographers, and tourists; our glance must be cursory and superficial, content to ascertain by its sweeping survey that treasures of knowledge and stores of information await the patient and diligent investigations of more learned and scientific enquirers.