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A 2153 B bb 2102: A 2061: Bb 2012 : B 1926; Cb 1881 B 1843; and the values of them, according to the usual mode of temperament, as follows: C 3600: C3445 D 3220: Eb 3009: E 2880: F 2691: F 2576: G 2407 G 2304: A 2153: Bb 2012 : and B 1926. This is according to what is termed the equal or mean-tone temperament. Dr. Crotch approves that method of tuning, and it is most commonly in use. Other modes, however, have been suggested, as calculated to bring the instrument nearer to the desired mathematical perfection; and Earl Stanhope (the extent of whose contributions to all the mechanical arts is generally known) has explained a new mode of tuning: the principal feature of which consists in its taking two intervals in the scale, without reference in the usual manner to the foundation or key-note. For instance, after having tuned the other notes on the instrument by perfect intervals, his Lordship recommends that Ab or G should be tuned exactly half way between E and C, forming with those notes what he terms two bi-equal thirds; and that the interval between G and its E double octave should be divided into three equal portions, called tri-equal quints: those portions to be occupied by D and A. The effect of this arrangement is to make the two bi-equal thirds something sharper than perfect thirds, so that one perfect third and two bi-equal thirds shall form a perfect octave, and the tri-equal fifths rather flatter than perfect fifths. Our musical readers know that, if an octave be made by tuning the thirds successively, the upper note will be too flat; and that, if seven octaves be made by tuning the fifths in succession perfectly, the highest note will be too sharp. The difference in the latter case is technically called The Great Wolf; and in the former, a little Wolf. We understand, however, from an ingenious artist, that on an experiment of the Stanhope mode of tuning it was not found so agreeable as the ordinary mode; from which we may infer that it is not eligible to take the relative values of the notes arbitrarily, even in the smallest degree. It also seems to follow that it is unsafe, on this subject, to trust to any other guide than the ear.

After all that has been said on tuning, it does not appear to us that any satisfactory result has been produced, except that the defects existing on keyed instruments can never be com removed; and, although for some particular occasions improvements may be found useful, or it may ev able that special modes of tuning should be ad

* See the experiments detailed in

instruments ordinarily in use, and the common mode of tuning, (that is, with equal temperament,) will be amply sufficient and most advisable for general purposes.

ART. VII. Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years since. 3 Vols. 12mo. Il. Is. Boards. Constable and Co. Edinburgh. Longman and Co. London. 1814.

THE HE Memoirs of the Count de Grammont have generally, of late years, been classed in point of authenticity among the fairy-tales of their lively and intelligent author; and, supposing that not a syllable of them were strictly true, the work itself would scarcely be the less historically valuable. This reinark, we fear, cannot be made with respect to Voltaire's Charles XII.; which, though it contains a number of wellestablished and important truths, is nevertheless, to all purposes of historical utility, as mere a romance as those of Florian and Marmontel. The difference lies in this circumstance: Count Hamilton's stories are the vivid reflections of the character, customs, and opinions of that class and period of society to which they refer; while the facts related by the patriarch of Ferney are coloured according to the dictates of his own fancy, and dressed out for ornament and effect. Whoever be the author of Waverly, and most of our readers probably know that it is attributed to Mr. Walter Scott, he is an historian of the former order; and those, who regard a knowlege of the motives and principles of actions as more worthy of attainment than the chronological succession of those actions themselves, will acquire a much larger share of such information from the perusal of these volumes than from all the tomes of Smollett, Belsham, and Adolphus. The frame of the picture is fiction: but the delineation itself is as correct, minute, and spirited a copy of nature as ever came from the hands of an artist.

That memorable year in our annals, 1745, is the æra of the principal events here recorded. Edward Waverley, the personage from whom the work derives its title, and whom in compliance with immemorial custom we must consequently designate as its hero, is the descendant of an old English tory family; of which his father, Mr. Richard Waverley, being a younger brother, has sought to build his fortunes on a departure from the hereditary principles of his house, though they are maintained in full force by Sir Everard, the elder, The characters of this worthy bachelor and his maiden sister, Mrs. Rachael, are drawn not only with fidelity but with considerable humour; yet the qualities of which they partake are so much in common with many equally reverend personages of popular notoriety,

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notoriety, and so wide a field of original delineation opens on us in the subsequent parts of the work, that we shall not stay to give a farther account of them. We must, however, state that our hero, having in his infancy been recognized as heir to his uncle in the title and estates of the family, becomes indebted for the greater portion of his education to his residence under the old baronet's roof, and imbibes from it most of the prejudices and opinions of his protector; not, indeed, carefully or systematically instilled into his mind, but unavoidably engendered there by the nature of the atmosphere which surrounds him. If he were afterward made to act a more prominent part on the stage of life, we should not now pass over the chapter of his education with no farther remark than that, consigned to the care of a studious and abstracted old family-chaplain, he is in fact abandoned to the suggestions of his own quick, romantic, and desultory genius; and that, for the greatest part self-taught, totally ignorant of the world, almost equally unacquainted with his own disposition, seriously attached to no system of opinion, and awake to all the impulses of curiosity, fancy, and imagination, he finds himself at an early age, and in the year preceding that of the rash and ill-fated enterprise of Charles Edward, invested (through the interest of his father with the ministry) with a captain's commission in a regiment of dragoons at that time quartered in some town on the eastern coast of Scotland.

In this situation, after the gloss of his youthful military pride has had time to share the fate of that of his first uniform, Edward soon grows tired of the constraints of regimental discipline; and he eagerly avails himself of the opportunity afforded by a short leave of absence to indulge his taste for freedom and novelty in an excursion through the adjacent parts of a country, which was at that time very little known to the greater part of its neighbours and fellow-subjects in the south of Great Britain, His first visit is to an old friend of his uncle, Mr. Cosmo Comyne Bradwardine, commonly called the Baron of Bradwardine; a gentleman of an extremely antient and respectable Lowland family, who had in early life been attached to the fortunes of the Pretender, obtained a commission in the French service under Marshal Berwick, and narrowly escaped from suffering in consequence of the share which he had taken in the rebellion of 1715, principally through the good offices of Sir Everard. At the Baron's mansion of Tulley-Veolan, in the county of Perth, it is not to be questioned that our young Englishman experienced the most hospitable and flattering reception, both from the excentric proprietor himself and from his only daughter and heiress, the simple and unassuming, but amiable, Miss Rose Bradwardine. There also, in the space of

a six weeks' sojourn, he learns, both experimentally and theoretically, a great many curious particulars relative to the state of the Lowlands of Scotland in the middle of the last century, with respect to national character, manners, customs, and opinions; which will be fully as novel and instructive to most of the present readers of Waverley as they could have been to the young captain of dragoons. About the expiration of this time, an accident happens which stimulates Edward's romantic disposition with a curiosity of the most ardent and restless description. The baron's cattle are carried away in the night, while the family are asleep, by a party of Highland marauders; and the confusion which this incident occasions throughout the household, the rage of the master, and the distress and distraction of the servants, lead to a long explanation from Miss Bradwardine to her father's guest on the state of actual warfare, interrupted only by occasional truces guaranteed by formal treaties, which then existed between those two widely different nations who divide the Mountains from the Lowlands of Scotland. That a great and warlike tribe existed at that period within the realm of Great Britain, claiming an absolute prescriptive right to subsist on the plunder of all the neighbouring country, and that this right was even encouraged by the chief men of the district, who alternately participated in the spoil, or took toll of their Lowland neighbours for restraining the depre dations of their vassals, were facts of which the ocular demonstration is now before him, and which operate on his active fancy like a wild and extraordinary dream; from which he awakes only with the most ardent longing to explore and become acquainted with the reality. The arrival at Tulley-Veolan of a special messenger from the chief of the neighbouring Highland clan of Mac-Ivor, to treat concerning the adjustment of some existing differences between his feudal sovereign and the baron, by virtue of which the former engages to use all the means in his power for the recovery of the plundered property, affords to Waverley an occasion not to be missed in his present temper of mind; and, after having been satisfied by his host that he might undertake the enterprise without personal danger, he accompanies the ambassador on his return from his successful mission.

On their way to the residence of Fergus Mac-Ivor Vich Ian Vohr,- for by these long-winded patronymics the Highlanders designated the identical personage who in the adjoining low countries was principally known by the name of his est 2, Glennaquoich, the pedestrians rest for a night in the cave of Donald Bean Lean, the captain of the gang who had so uncivilly possessed themselves of the Baron's kine, and from whom the faithful envoy of Mac-Ivor proceeds to demand and

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obtain restitution by the use of certain cogent arguments best known to himself and his employer. During the few hours spent in this savage retreat, our young dragoon has his eyes still farther opened, and his curiosity still more excited, with respect to that extraordinary state of society the investigation of which had been the cause and motive of his journey. His wonder and astonishment are exalted to their highest pitch by his first introduction to, and still more by every succeeding step in his acquaintance with, the chief of the Mac-Ivors; at whose mansion of Glennaquoich he is persuaded to prolong his residence till he finds himself, on a sudden, and in consequence of a chain of circumstances which are very ingeniously and naturally combined by the author, involved in the knowlege and almost in the participation of the intrigues, of which Fergus himself was a prime mover, for the restoration of the Pretender.

A romantic passion for Flora, the sister of Fergus, and an equally romantic admiration of the noble and dazzling qualities displayed by Fergus himself, operate strongly on a mind in some degree disposed by the prejudices of education to the same view of things. Waverley was also at that time peculiarly irritated by supposed ill treatment, (the consequence of mistakes arising from his own imprudent conduct,) in his dismission from the service to which he belonged. He has already, therefore, in thought, devoted himself to the prosecution of the perilous enterprise now in hand, when a repulse from the lady again unsettles his wavering inclinations; and, joined to some compunctious visitings on the score of rebellion, it determines him, in opposition to the urgent remonstrances of his friend, who is unwilling to let slip the opportunity of so useful an accession to their cause as that of a young Englishman of Waverley's character and prospects, to make good his retreat in time. Fergus, finding his last resolution not to be shaken, hastens Edward's departure, and adopts all measures in his power for facilitating his safe return through Stirling to Edinburgh but neither he nor his young and inexperienced guest is apprized of the extent of the dangers to which he is exposed. Nor are they aware that the circumstances of his long absence from the regiment, in spite of repeated letters of recall, (which never reached him, being intercepted by the treachery of Donald Bean,) of his residence first with a notorious Lowland Jacobite and afterward with one of the most conspicuous leaders of the intended insurrection, and finally of his having been present at a hunting party in the Highlands, made for the express purpose (though unknown to him) of concerting the first steps of that insurrection, have marked him already as a suspected traitor. An accidental fray, in which, on his journey, he is involved at the

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