indulgent and devoted. But if I could not please
him when indeed I loved him, you may imagine
how often I did wrong when I was so much
afraid of him as to quietly avoid his company for
fear of his outbursts of passion. One thing I
remember noticing, that the more M. de la
Tourelle was displeased with me, the more Lefebvre
seemed to chuckle; and when I was restored to
favour, sometimes on as sudden an impulse as
that which occasioned my disgrace, Lefebvre
would look askance at me with his cold,
malicious eyes, and once or twice at such times he
spoke most disrespectfully to M. de la Tourelle.

I have almost forgotten to say that, in the
early days of my life at Les Rochers, M. de
la Tourelle, in contemptuous indulgent pity
at my weakness in disliking the dreary
grandeur of the salon, wrote up to the milliner in
Paris from whom my corbeille de marriage had
come, to desire her to look out for me a maid
of middle age, experienced in the toilette, and
with so much refinement that she might on
occasion serve as companion to me.

MR. HULLAH'S CLASSES.

A LADDER, with the Latin motto " Per scalam
ascendimus," mounting by the scale (or ladder),
stood over the fireplaces of St. Martin's Hall,
lately destroyed by fire. The master of that hall
was Mr. John Hullah, the most effectual musical
reformer whose good influence has been felt by
the people of England in our day, or in any day
before it. His energetic hand has held the
ladder by which other men have mounted; but
it has been to him no ladder of fortune. Even
before he was burnt out by fire the other day,
he was burnt out by zeal.

In a Kentish village numbering hardly more
than five hundred inhabitants, thanks to Mr.
Hullah's scales, the children, the young men
and women, even several of the old men who
work on farms, have become singers. This
Christmas, and every Christmas and Easter for
some years past, they have performed an oratorio
of Handel or some other great master; they
cherish their church music, and they live
together with their minds awakened to such
sense of harmony, that for years past not one of
them has been punished for, or accused of,
offence against the law. The vicar and his
parish are as one family together. At one of
their mid-winter oratorios a young woman did
not come in till after the music had begun. Her
house had been snowed up, but her father, a
farmer, had been getting his labourers together,
and they had all cleared a way for her, that she
might go and take her part in the sublime strain.

At the bottom of all this, what do we find
but Mr. Hullah's music books? Some of them
found their way by chance to Pitcairn's Island,
where men have learnt from them to make the
desert blossom with their songs. Year after
year Mr. Hullah has taught classes upon classes,
His disciples have taught in the provinces with
steady zeal, of which we shall best show the
force and the effect by an example.

Twenty years ago, there was no popular
taste in this country for anything but dance
music, comic songs, and sentimental ballads of
the weakest texture. Nobody then believed
England to be what everybody now sees it is—
a musical nation. English opera then was a
tradition more than half suspected to be, like other
traditions, fiction. Now, the two largest theatres
in London vie with each other in producing it,
and we have discovered that our nation begets,
not only singers and good judges of song, but
musicians and composers who in the new atmosphere
of national appreciation will know how to hold
up their heads in presence of the foreigner.

It seemed to Mr. Hullah in those bygone days
that a diffused knowledge of the elements of
music would be a great gain to his country. He
was first struck by the deficiency, not in
observation of the lower, but of the middle and upper
classes. When polite folks came together they
bored one another with bad solo singing, and
concerted music was almost impossible, because
there were few vocalists who could really read
music at all.

About the end of eighteen thirty-nine, Mr.
Hullah, having become acquainted with Dr.
Mainzer's system in Paris, again went thither;
for he had heard of M. Wilhem, and he found
him carrying out his system of teaching on a
very extensive scale, having direct government
sanction and support so far as regarded his
schools for the poor, whether children or adults.

Twenty years ago, Mr. Hullah proposed to the
Committee of Council on Education, of which
Dr. Kay was then secretary, to open singing-
schools for schoolmasters on Wilhem's system in
London; and these singing classes soon grew into
classes for all kinds of persons; but their growth
was impeded by want of a place of meeting,
ample, convenient, and not too costly. Saint
Martin's Hall, of which the first stone was laid
by Lord Carlisle in June, 'forty-seven, was built;
but, alas! Saint Martin's Hall, in the phrase of
the money-getter, "did not pay." It is difficult to
estimate the value of the work done in it for
the elevation and refinement of the people.
The effort to maintain it had drained all the
resources of its founder, and its maintenance
began to seem impossible when the recent fire
brought the whole case to a final issue. Yet,
during the past twenty years one hundred and
ninety-five classes of adults, of both sexes,
averaging seventy persons in each class, have been
taught, by Mr. Hullah himself, and by a loyal
body of assistants, of whom the foremost were
Mr. May and Mr. Monk, and two other gentlemen
presently to be mentioned by name. The sale
of musical publications has been enormous, and
among these, each set of large sheets represents
a class somewhere—a single book often the
study of a teacher; parents have learnt that
they might teach their children. Brothers and
sisters have taught one another. The men in
the lighthouse on the North Foreland, having
got hold of one of Mr. Hullah's manuals, worked
through the exercises together, helping and
correcting one another as they best might. Others