The Hautboy Concertos, six in number, were written at Cannons, the seat of the Duke of Chandos, (Pope’s Timon,) in the year 1720, and published in 1729. Four of them still continue to be used in the Ancient Concerts, where they are admirably performed, and are great favourites with the subscribers, as they deserve to be with all lovers of good music.
AUGUST, 1833.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES OF MARIN MERSENNE AND ATHANASIUS KIRCHER.
[Chiefly from HAWKINS’s and BURNEY’s Histories.]
AMONG the laborious and voluminous writers on music, those now selected stand prominently forward; and though their respective merits are far from equal—the French ecclesiastic being undeniably superior to the German jesuit, both in knowledge and exactness—yet the works of each have long enjoyed a high reputation, and will always be found useful to those who study music as a science, or historically, and as connected with general literature.
MARIN MERSENNE (in Latin, Marinus Mersennus), a most learned French writer, was born in 1588, at Ayse, in the province of Maine. He received his instruction in polite literature at the college of Flêche; but, quitting that seminary, he went to Paris, and, after having studied divinity some years in the college of the Sorbonne, entered himself among the Minims (a religious order), and, in 1611, received the habit. In 1612, he went to reside in the convent of that order at Paris, where he was ordained priest, and performed his first mass in 1613. Immediately upon his settlement he applied himself to the study of the Hebrew language, under the direction of Father John Bruno, a Scotch Minim, and having acquired a competent degree of skill therein, became a teacher of philosophy and theology in the convent of Nevers. In this station he continued till the year 1619, when he returned to Paris, determined to spend the remainder of his life in study and conversation, as indeed he did, making them his whole employment. In the pursuit of his studies he established and kept up a correspondence with all the learned and ingenious men of his time.
During his stay at Flêche he contracted a friendship with Des Cartes, and manifested it in many instances; of which the following may be reckoned one. Being at Paris, and looked on as the friend of the great philosopher, he reported that Des Cartes was erecting a new system of physics on the foundation of a vacuum; but finding that the public were indifferent to it, he immediately sent intelligence to his friend that a vacuum was not then the fashion, on which the philosopher changed his system, and adopted the old doctrine of a plenum. The residence of Mersenne at Paris did not prevent his making several journeys into foreign countries, for he visited Holland in the middle of the year 1629, and Italy four times, in 1639, 1641, 1644, 1646. In the month of July, 1648, having been to call on his friend Des Cartes, he returned home to his convent excessively heated; to allay his thirst, he drank cold water, and soon after was seized with an illness which produced an abscess in his side. His physicians, imagining his disorder to be a kind of pleurisy, ordered him to be bled several times, but to no purpose. At last it was thought proper to open his side: the operation was begun, but he expired in the midst of it, on the 1st of September, 1648, being then about sixty years of age. He had desired the surgeons, in case of miscarriage in the operation, to open his body, which direction they complied with, and found that they had made the incision two inches below the abscess!