So he had only one barrel, his sole occupation being to 'bewilder the young ideas of Dr. Blimber's young gentlemen.' Sometimes he had his Virgil stop on, and at other times his Herodotus stop. In trying to keep up the comparison, however, Dickens makes a curious mistake. In the above quotation Feeder is assigned one barrel only, while in Chapter XLI we are told that he had 'his other barrels on a shelf behind him.'
We find another comparison in _Little Dorrit_, when the long-suffering Pancks turns round on Casby, his employer, and exposes his hypocrisy. Pancks, who has had much difficulty in getting his master's rents from the tenants, makes up his mind to leave him; and before doing so he tells the whole truth about Casby to the inhabitants of Bleeding Heart Yard. 'Here's the Stop,' said Pancks, 'that sets the tune to be ground. And there is but one tune, and its name is "Grind! Grind! Grind!"'
Although the guitar was a fashionable instrument sixty years ago, there are but few references to it. This was the instrument that enabled the three Miss Briggses, each of them performers, to eclipse the glory of the Miss Tauntons, who could only manage a harp. On the eventful day of 'The Steam Excursion' (_S.B._) the three sisters brought their instruments, carefully packed up in dark green cases,
which were carefully stowed away in the bottom of the boat, accompanied by two immense portfolios of music, which it would take at least a week's incessant playing to get through.
At a subsequent stage of the proceedings they were asked to play, and after replacing a broken string, and a vast deal of screwing and tightening, they gave 'a new Spanish composition, for three voices and three guitars,' and secured an encore, thus completely overwhelming their rivals. In the account of the _French Watering-Place_ (_R.P._) we read about a guitar on the pier, 'to which a boy or woman sings without any voice little songs without any tune.'
On one of his night excursions in the guise of an 'Uncommercial Traveller' Dickens discovered a stranded Spaniard, named Antonio. In response to a general invitation 'the swarthy youth' takes up his cracked guitar and gives them the 'feeblest ghost of a tune,' while the inmates of the miserable den kept time with their heads.