WONDER if it has ever occurred to any of the readers of Chatterbox that the bagpipes of the Highland glen, and the mighty organ which peals through a Cathedral aisle, are one and the same instrument? When they are reduced to their simplest elements of wind-chest, pipes and reeds, there is practically no difference between the two.
The Bagpipe in its varying forms may be described as a portable organ, whether blown by the mouth of the performer or by a pair of bellows. The instrument is very ancient.
A curious old gem has been preserved, bearing the device of Apollo carrying a lyre in his arms and a bagpipe slung across his back, which takes that instrument right back to the days of ancient Greece.
Powerful bagpipes are used amongst the mountain tribes of Hindustan, and travellers meet with them both in China and Persia. The ancient Romans patronised this instrument largely, and the Emperor Nero was a skilled performer.
Old Ornamental Bagpipe.
A celebrated Italian story-teller of the thirteenth century mentions that in his time the bagpipe was quite a fashionable instrument. Chaucer and Spenser both allude to it, and the former says, in Henry IV., that Falstaff was 'as melancholy as a lover's lute, or drone of a bagpipe.'
It is usually supposed that the bagpipe was brought from the East by the Crusaders; it was reckoned as a court instrument in the time of Edward the Second. In France, it was popular in polite society, up to the end of the thirteenth century, when it was gradually banished to the lower classes, and chiefly played by blind beggars. Two curious old pictures exist of that date, representing bagpipe-players, one on stilts, the other playing for a girl who is dancing on his shoulders.
In the seventeenth century, Louis the Fourteenth of France, casting about for new amusements for his favourites, rescued the bagpipe, or, as the French called it, the 'cornemeuse,' from its low surroundings, and introduced it into his Arcadian festivities. We may picture a dignified Marquis and Marquise, as Watteau has painted them, in the fantastic garb of shepherds and shepherdesses, frolicking to the music of the bagpipes, in the forest glades of Versailles or Fontainebleau.