Chamberss Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 | Page 8

until
the strain had ceased, and silence aroused us to the matter-of-fact world
of business. One blind fiddler, we know him well, with face upturned
towards the sky, has stood a public benefactor any day these twenty
years, and we know not how much longer, to receive the substantial
homage of the music-loving million. But that he is scarcely old enough,
he might have been the identical Oxford-Street Orpheus of
Wordsworth:--
'His station is there; and he works on the crowd, He sways them with
harmony merry and loud; He fills with his power all their hearts to the
brim-- Was aught ever heard like his fiddle and him?'
Decidedly not--there is nothing to match it; and so thinks 'the
one-pennied boy' who spares him his one penny, and deems it well
bestowed. Then there are the harpers, with their smooth
French-horn-breathing and piccola-piping comrades, who at the
soothing hour of twilight affect the tranquil and retired paved courts or
snug enclosures far from the roar and rumble of chariot-wheels, where,
clustered round with lads and lasses released from the toils of the day,
they dispense romance and sentiment, and harmonious cadences, in
exchange for copper compliments and the well-merited applause of fit
audiences, though few. Again, there are the valorous brass-bands of the
young Germans, who blow such spirit-stirring appeals from their
travel-worn and battered tubes--to say nothing of the thousand
performers of solos and duets, who, wherever there is the chance of a
moment's hearing, are ready to attempt their seductions upon our ears

to the prejudice of our pockets. All these we must pass over with this
brief mention upon the present occasion; our business being with their
numerous antitheses and would-be rivals--the incarnate nuisances who
fill the air with discordant and fragmentary mutilations and distortions
of heaven-born melody, to the distraction of educated ears and the
perversion of the popular taste.
'Music by handle,' as it has been facetiously termed, forms our present
subject. This kind of harmony, which is not too often deserving of the
name, still constitutes, notwithstanding the large amount of
indisputable talent which derives its support from the gratuitous
contributions of the public, by far the larger portion of the peripatetic
minstrelsy of the metropolis. It would appear that these grinders of
music, with some few exceptions which we shall notice as we proceed,
are distinguished from their praiseworthy exemplars, the musicians, by
one remarkable, and to them perhaps very comfortable characteristic.
Like the exquisite Charles Lamb--if his curious confession was not a
literary myth--they have ears, but no ear, though they would hardly be
brought to acknowledge the fact so candidly as he did. They may be
divided, so far as our observation goes, into the following classes:--1.
Hand-organists; 2. Monkey-organists; 3. Handbarrow-organists; 4.
Handcart-organists; 5. Horse-and-cart-organists; 6. Blindbird-organists;
7. Piano-grinders; 8. Flageolet-organists and pianists; 9. Hurdy-gurdy
players.
1. The hand-organist is most frequently a Frenchman of the
departments, nearly always a foreigner. If his instrument be good for
anything, and he have a talent for forming a connection, he will be
found to have his regular rounds, and may be met with any hour in the
week at the same spot he occupied at that hour on the week previous.
But a man so circumstanced is at the head of the vagabond profession,
the major part of whom wander at their own sweet will wherever
chance may guide. The hand-organ which they lug about varies in
value from L.10 to L.150--at least, this last-named sum was the cost of
a first-rate instrument thirty years ago, such as were borne about by the
street-organists of Bath, Cheltenham, and the fashionable
watering-places, and the grinders of the West End of London at that

period, when musical talent was much less common than it is now. We
have seen a contract for repairs to one of these instruments, including a
new stop and new barrels, amounting to the liberal sum of L.75: it
belonged to a man who had grown so impudent in prosperity, as to
incur the penalty of seven years' banishment from the town in which he
turned his handle, for the offence of thrashing a young nobleman, who
stood between him and his auditors too near for his sense of dignity.
Since the invention of the metal reed, however, which, under various
modifications and combinations, supplies the sole utterance of the
harmonicon, celestina, seraphina, colophon, accordian, concertina, &c.
&c. and which does away with the necessity for pipes, the street
hand-organ has assumed a different and infinitely worse character.
Some of them yet remain what the old Puritans called 'boxes of
whistles'--that is, they are all pipes; but many of them might with equal
propriety be called 'boxes of Jews-harps,' being all reeds, or rather
vibrating metal tongues--and more still are of