No. 5 is a clever and very pleasing song, with many beauties, and never a fault.
No 6 possesses the best characteristics of a good sea-song, without any of those vulgarisms in cadence which are often met with in music of this description. The melody is free, the accompaniment unaffected, and the effect of the whole agreeable.
No. 7 is also a sailor’s song, but of the gentlest kind,—of a mariner who sings of ‘The chime of the vesper, the music of prayer;’ so that nothing at all approaching to nautical slang is to be found here. The air is very pretty, and a short chorus, for three sopranos, at the end of each stanza, adds such to effect.
No. 8 is more elegant than new. The composer, a foreigner, may be excused some errors in emphasis that appear in this ballad, which may be corrected without much trouble.
DOUBLE-BASS.
METHOD for the DOUBLE-BASS, according to the English system of tuning and fingering, compiled from the treatises of MINÉ, FROHLICH, &c., and illustrated by numerous extracts from the Orchestral Compositions of HAYDN and MOZART; together with an explanation of the mode of simplifying ordinary Bass-parts, so as to adapt them to this instrument, by J. HAMILTON. (Cocks and Co.)
THE reader perhaps will start at seeing a treatise on such an instrument announced, but the double-base has risen to great importance in the orchestra, and requires a much more regular course of study than in days gone by, when all sorts of people undertook to perform on it.