glances of Mr. IIusband at a pretty maid! no pouting of madam! no family-disputes about the division of a legacy or an estate! No, no: the gift of Dunmow hacon is stopped in good time, or there

N. B. Let the music be marked thus: 20,

40, 60, 80, 100, &c. &c. in every part of accompaniment. Some of your numerous readers may improve on the above.

Your's, &c.

T. D. F.

To the Editor of the Monthly Magazine.

SIR,

I BEG leave to recommend the following hint to the notice of your musical friends.

Out of a dozen rehearsals, twelve are attended with delays and inconveniences, owing to mistakes in some of the principal or subordinate parts. To rectify this, I propose, that composers (particularly in concertos, or any long pieces of music) number every 20 bars of the leading parts in their scores. The copyist would of course do the same by every part separately; and where, (as it often Occurs) there are 70, 80, or 100 bars rest, for horns or flutes. I further propose to mark them according to the leading part, and not (as is now customary) all together between two bars; should there be any odd bars, they might very easily be added. The advantage is obvious: If the leader should hear any instrument out of its place, or indeed if the individual who played that instrument were to find himself wrong, he might soon learn where the error lay, by comparing his part with the principal one; and should the band be obliged to stop in order to rectify a mistake, instead of beginning the whole movement a second time, the leader might say begin from the 80th, 100th, or any other given bar; the whole orchestra would immediately cast their eyes towards the number, and the piece would go on with out the least delay. Having been frequent. ly extremely annoyed by trying the same movement three or four times over, be-, cause a flute, or an oboe, or some other instrument, was out, (as they term it in an orchestra), I submit this hint to the public, with a full confidence that (if applied) it will answer every expectation,

without the least trouble or inconvenience to the performers. Your's, &c.

September 18, 1809.

HARMONICUS.

SIR,

ΜΑ

ANY ingenious inventions have been offered to the public, for preserving lives in cases of fire; and there is no doubt that numbers might be saved if these salutary means were generally adopted. But either owing to the expense of those machines, or rather from inere carelessness, people choose the risk of being burnt in their beds; and we seldom hear of a conflagration, but some of the inhabitants are consumed in their houses. There is one simple mode of security, which I recommended to the public ten years ago; but which, I fear, will be despised on account of its simplicity. I mean a few yards of knotted rope to be fixed to a table, bedstead, settee, &c. by which means most people might descend with great ease, and perfect safety, from the window to the street. This is attended with almost no expense, occupies little room, and is within reach of the poorest. I believe the most delicate female would not hesitate a moment to slip down thus from a window, if precluded from other means of escape. I purposely avoid a minute detail of the mode of using this contrivance, as every person possessed of common sense, must at once understand it; only a hook or noose at the end of the rope, and knots, at proper distances, seem absolutely necessary. Such a ropeladder as is used on shipboard, would be still more convenient, and better adapted to the use of women and children. The only objection I can see to this, is the additional expenses, which might be a consideration with many, and that it would occupy more room than the simple rope. For my own part, I can never lie down with pleasure in the lofty attic of a London house, where the drunkenness and dissipation of servants often occasion the dismal calamity of the house and inhabitants perishing together.

Shakespeare, in the Two Gentlemen of Verona (act. 1. scene 1.) "Proteus. Therefore thou art a sheep.-Speed. Such another proof will make me cry baa." It is rather extraordinary that Walker remarks, in the Principles of Pronunciation, prefixed to his dictionary (No. 77), that this word has been adopted precisely for the same purpose "in almost all languages." I am afraid this circumstance would go fatally to the very foundation of the whole plan; for it can hardly be supposed that " almost all" nations have been uniform, or even nearly so, in their pronunciation of these identical letters.

The barking of the dog I have already given on two poetical authorities. I find from Walker that Aristophanes expresses it by the diphthong as, a; exactly equivalent, says Walker, to our owo in bow

Wow.

The owl, I have given from Shakespeare. Plautus however expresses it differently, as tu-tu (the very expression which your first correspondent affirms that the same poet has given to the cuckoo!); and two other authors, an English and a French, write it respectively too-too and tou-tou.†

The cries of the crowd and the frog were also stated in my former letter; but each of these I have since found expres. sed differently. Parkhurst, in his Greek Lexicon, on the word napag, attributes this word (korax) to the raven or crow, and says, that Aristophanes expresses the croaking of the frog by kour. I have since seen the frog-chorus in Aristophanes stated more fully (so far as concerns the cry of the animal) as follows:

Key, &c. page x. +Plautus:

-Tu, tu, istic, inquam, vin’afferi noctuam, Quæ tu, tu, usque dicat tibi ?"

"It appears here, (says Mr. For ter, in his defence of the Greek accents,) that an owl's cry was tu tu to a Roman ear, as it is too too to an English. Lambin, who was a Frenchalludit ad man, observes on the passage: noctuæ vocem seu cantum, tu-tu seu tou-tou.' "He here alludes to the voice or noise of an owl, tu-tu or tou-tou (French).'"-Quoted from Walker's Key, &c. p. xi.

As I am no naturalist, my ideas are not perfectly clear on the subject of a bird which I mentioned in my former letter by the name of the pee-wil. Dr. Mavor, in his Elements of Natural History, gives this a secondary appellation of the lapwing. Now Harmer, in some part of his Observations on Passages of Scripture, speaks of the lapwing as called upupa in the East, from its note being pupu:-and there seems some coinci dence between this remark and the name of hoopoe, given by Dr. Mavor to one of the birds that he describes, and which, he says, "receives its name from its note.' The doctor gives a plate of the hoopoe; which, I suppose, will help those who know more about birds than I do to solve the difficulty.

I mentioned explicitly that I did not pretend that the sound assigned to the trumpet, in the poetical quotation which I have I gave, was at all suited to it. since found it much better illustrated: first, in a line from a very old Latin poet (Ennius)*

"At tuba terribili sonitu taratantara

of Old Towler:

Heigho chivy !

Hark forward, hark forward, tantivy ! &c.

Some of my fresh examples I have now given incidentally, among the confirmations of my old ones. I shall here add the rest.

The name of the bird called cockatoo is given to it from its note.

A periodical publication of last month, in some account of the Feast of Fools (or of the Ass), one of the moralities, or sort of sacred dramas, that were formerly exhibited in the churches, at particular seasons, in Roman-catholic countries, gives the following from Du Conge as the first line of the chorus to the song sung in the cathedral of Sens on this oc

Quoted in the notes on Heyne's Virgil, Eneid ix. 503.

But the trumpet, with a terrible sound, said taratantara

Swift: the verses on Hamilton's bawn. casion;

tion, that Mr. Maxwell, in his "Essay on Tune," printed at Edinburgh 1781, has demonstrated, page 194, that forty-four strings or pipes are required, in each octave of a piano-forte or organ, that shall be capable of performing in all the twenty-four keys, in which modern compositions, are wrote, or into which they frequently modulate, without temperaments; that is, without introducing concords that are imperfect or tempered, and which consequently are somewhat out of tune, and would be sensibly noticed as such, if these imperfect intervals were held out, or occurred in the long notes of a piece of full music.

The organs to which Mr. Lofft allades, as I suppose, are those made by Mr. Thomas Elliot, No. 12, Tottenham-court, under the Rev. William Hawke's patent, which instruments I have not yet seen; but I hastily examined last spring, some of the piano-fortes constructed under the same patent, by Mr. Robert Bill, No. 49, Rathbone-place, which, as far as I recol lect, had forty-eight strings in each octave, viz. four unison strings to each of the seven long finger keys, two unisons for each of the five short finger keys, considered as sharps, and two other unisons for each of the same keys, considered as flats; or without the double strings to each note, merely for giving strength of tone, twenty-four strings in each octave are necessary in these patent instruments, for obtaining only seventeen intervals in the octave; the unison on the natural notes or long keys, admitting of the whole clavier or range of finger-keys being shifted to the right or left, by means of a pedal, without altering the pitch of any but the short or half-notes.

The expedient proposed by Mr. Lofft, of dividing each of the short finger-keys, has in part been adopted long ago, in the Temple Church and Foundling Hospital organs, in London, as I believe with perfect convenience to the performer: and were the same extended to every short Loy, seventeen strings or pipes in an octaye, or such an instrument, would answer all the ends of Mr. Hawke's twentyfour, besides avoiding the danger of either straining the instrument by accidentally moving the pedals and keys at the same time, cr of striking both the flat and sharp notes at the same time, in rapid modulations. The accidental sharp or flat notes, which occur in some music, might also be readier introduced on such an instrument as Mr. Lofft alludes to, than en Mr. Hawke's instrument.

In the tuning of the twelve notes in each octave, that are in common use, some authors and tuners advise, the making certain chords or intervals perfect, and others very nearly so; throwing the imperfection or temperament, wholly or in great part, on certain other intervals, called the bearing-notes, wolves, &c. So in like manner, when seventeen notes as above, twenty-one which the late Dr. Robert Smith used, or any other number of notes, are introduced in the octave (short of the whole number which Mr. Maxwell has shown to be necessary for perfect use) bearing notes or wolves must unavoidably be introduced, somewhere in the scale.

I have not yet been able to learn the exact mode adopted for tuning each note on Mr. Hawke's patent instruments, or to obtain a table of his seventeen intervals, expressed by the major-tone, the minor-tone, and the hemitone 18 (or by any other musical notation), otherwise, I would point out the particular chords which are imperfect or tempered, in the use of these pateat instruments, and the exact quantity or degree of temperament in each case. Mr. Hawkes, the patentee, or some other person acquainted with his mode of tuning, will, I hope, oblige me and others of your readers, by giving an account thereof, and such a table as I have mentioned, in a future Number of the Monthly Magazine.

P.S.Since writing the above, a musical friend has put into my hands a printed quarto copper-plate pige, describing the use of the grand patent harmonic piano-forte, lately invented by D. Loeschman, of No 28, Newman-street, Oxford-road, which, by the help of six pedals, produces seven scales of twelve for others, by the use of the pedal belonging notes each (two only of them being changed to each respective scale), making twenty-four notes or intonations in each octave of these instruments, which are pretended to produce eighteen major and fifteen minor keys in tune. Should these be the instruments to which Mr, Lofit has alluded, I beg to inform him, that the calculations necessary for showing how well their pretentions to perfect tune intricate for the Monthly Magazine; and are formed, would be far too technical and would best appear in Mr. Tilloch's Philosophical Magazine, where a series of similar de

tails have of late been inserted, and to whom I shall probably, ere long, make a communica tion on these patent instruments.