246. SHAKSPEARE, who is cried up as the great interpreter of the human heart, has said, that the man in whose soul there is no _music_, or love of music, is 'fit for murders, treasons, stratagems, and spoils.' 'Our _immortal_ bard,' as the profligate SHERIDAN used to call him in public, while he laughed at him in private; our '_immortal_ bard' seems to have forgotten that Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, were flung into the fiery furnace (made seven times hotter than usual) amidst the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, and dulcimer, and all kinds of music; he seems to have forgotten that it was a music and a dance-loving damsel that chose, as a recompense for her elegant performance, the bloody head of John the Baptist, brought to her in a charger; he seems to have forgotten that, while Rome burned, Nero fiddled: he did not know, perhaps, that cannibals always dance and sing while their victims are roasting; but he might have known, and he must have known, that England's greatest tyrant, Henry VIII., had, as his agent in blood, Thomas Cromwell, expressed it, 'his _sweet soul_ enwrapped in the _celestial_ sounds of music;' and this was just at the time when the ferocious tyrant was ordering Catholics and Protestants to be tied back to back on the same hurdle, dragged to Smithfield on that hurdle, and there tied to, and burnt from, the same stake. Shakspeare must have known these things, for he lived immediately after their date; and if he had lived in our day, he would have seen instances enough of 'sweet souls' enwrapped in the same manner, and capable, if not of deeds equally bloody, of others, discovering a total want of feeling for sufferings not unfrequently occasioned by their own wanton waste, and waste arising, too, in part, from their taste for these 'celestial sounds.'
247. O no! the heart of man is not to be known by this test: a _great_ fondness for music is a mark of great weakness, great vacuity of mind: not of hardness of heart; not of vice; not of downright folly; but of a want of capacity, or inclination, for sober thought. This is not always the case: accidental circumstances almost force the taste upon people: but, generally speaking, it is a preference of sound to sense. But the man, and especially the _father_, who is not fond of _babies_; who does not feel his heart softened when he touches their almost boneless limbs; when he sees their little eyes first begin to discern; when he hears their tender accents; the man whose heart does not beat truly to this test, is, to say the best of him, an object of compassion.