The musical establishment of this cathedral at present consists of 6 minor-canons, at about 100l. per annum, with a good house, and a living soon after their election; an organist at 100l. per annum, with a house; 12 lay-vicars at from 40l. to 50l. per annum; and 10 choristers, or boys, at 6l. per annum.
The service is daily. The choristers are taught (or ought to be) singing three times a week in the church, where there is a musical school-room; and learn reading, writing, and arithmetic, at private schools, at the expense of the church; the latter being a regulation lately introduced by the Dean and Chapter, who, probably, having a foresight of what seems now near at hand, thought it prudent to do something out of their large revenues for the active and useful members of the church. With this view they have also, we are told, augmented the salaries of the lay-clerks, by the liberal addition of 10l. The time, however, is fast approaching when the real labourers in the service of religion will be paid according to their work; then will our church be better served and more respected.
MEMOIRS OF DR. BURNEY,
Arranged from his own Manuscripts, from Family Papers, and from Personal Recollections. By his Daughter, Madame D’ARBLAY. Moxon, Bond-street, 9 vols. 8vo.
HAD we supposed, after so long a delay, that Madame D’Arblay really meant to publish a life of her father, we certainly should have delayed our memoir of Dr. Burney till enabled to profit by so authentic an account as the present, which was written under advantages that only one of his family could have possessed, and which give an interest to it that could not have been imparted by any other pen.
In the year 1782, while yet in his prime, and possessing in full vigour his intellectual faculties, Dr. Burney contemplated and even commenced writing memoirs of his own life. An introduction which he began to draw up for his intended work, says, ‘Perhaps few have been better enabled to describe, from an actual survey, the manners and customs of the age in which he lived, than myself; ascending from those of the most humble cottagers, and lowest mechanics, to the first nobility, and most elevated personages with whom circumstances, situation, and accident, at different periods of my life, have rendered me familiar. Oppressed and laborious husbandmen; insolent and illiberal yeomanry; overgrown farmers; generous and hospitable merchants; men of business and men of pleasure; men of letters; men of science; artists; sportsmen and country squires; dissipated and extravagant voluptuaries; gamesters; ambassadors; statesmen; and even sovereign princes, I have had opportunities of examining in almost every point of view: all these it is my intention to display in their respective situations; and to delineate their virtues, vices, and apparent degrees of happiness and misery.’
It must be acknowledged that this bill of fare is marked by self-confidence, and that it would have required no common observation and talent to fulfil the promises held out. Unfortunately we are left in the dark how far Dr. Burney could have kept his word, for the plan appears to have been abandoned as rapidly as it was conceived, and never returned to till the year 1807, when the doctor was already an octogenarian, and a paralytic attack had perhaps acted on his mind as it certainly had on his body. From this time, however, he is said to have composed many manuscript volumes of various sizes, containing the history of his life, from his cradle nearly to his grave.—Whether in these memoirs the doctor displayed the characters, and entered into the concerns of the cottagers, mechanics, husbandmen, yeomanry, farmers, or even artists (of the same profession) according to the promises of his own prospectus, the present work affords us no means of judging: it is essentially, and from title-page to colophon, a book of the drawing-room and the boudoir; it is conversant alone with the Corinthian order of society, the porcelain clay of humanity; not an individual undistinguished either by rank, title, fashion, or literary fame, is judged worthy the honours of the sitting, and although the enumeration of dinner and evening parties, visitings and conversazioni, is far from scanty, yet, for all that appears in these three volumes, the historian of music may never have formed an acquaintance with, or received at his table, a brother musician in the course of his long life; except, indeed, some foreign singers, of whose private performances at his house we shall presently have to extract an account.
A list of some dozen celebrated names is given, indeed, as always happy to accept Dr. Burney’s invitations, and assist at his musical parties; but of the private familiar intercourse which must have taken place between him and his fellow-professors, we have not a trace. If this is his own omission, we must say it is in bad taste; he may have wished towards the close of his life to be considered rather as a literary man and a wit than as a musician; but, if so, he forgot that it was the union of the two characters which rendered his case remarkable, and called so much of public attention to him.
The memoirs, however, form a very amusing book, full of anecdotes, which if sometimes a little too long, and at others scarcely of importance enough to have merited recording at this distance of time, are always lively and well told, and are the more interesting, as they introduce the reader to the familiar society of Dr. Johnson, Garrick, Burke, Bruce the traveller, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and the whole constellation of wits and literary characters both male and female, which shone with such lustre from fifty to sixty years ago. The picture of parental and family attachment, too, which these volumes display, is in the highest degree charming in itself, and honorable to the parties concerned, who must all have been highly amiable to have been thus, without exception, beloved and loving.
Our readers are aware that Dr. Burney’s first introduction to London was as an articled scholar to Dr. Arne, who appears to have given him very little instruction, but to have, on the other hand, worked him very hard in the monotonous drudgery of music copying; nevertheless, the young apprentice, drawing upon his own resources, both of genius and industry, contrived to compose anonymously a part of the music for a revival of Thomson’s Masque of Alfred, and two other small pieces, a burletta of Robin Hood, and a pantomime called Queen Mab. From this unworthy servitude the doctor was at length rescued before the expiration of his articles, by an event so odd in itself, so creditable to the good sense and manly feeling of two, at least, of the parties concerned in it, and so well told by the authoress, that we extract her account at length.