“And is it in regard to the shake you’d be spaking, sir?” replied the master.  “Sure and if ye were sore afraid yourself, would not ye be shaking?  Ay, I’ll be your bail that you would, and shaking in your shoes too!  Plase to leave me and my pupil alone:  many a one will be coming to-morrow twenty and thirty miles, every inch of it, to hear Master ——­ sing, that would not step out twenty yards to hear you prache.”—­Ibid.

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CALCULATING NOTES.—­PAGANINI.

Stephen Storace had a remarkably good head for figures.  When a boy, his passion for calculation was beyond all belief.  Michael Kelly says, he has been known to multiply four figures by four figures, by memory, in three minutes.  When young, Kelly tells us, Storace was so astonished that fifty guineas should be paid for singing a song, that he counted the notes in it, and calculated the amount of each at 4s. 10d.

This passion for calculating the value of notes (musical ones) has seized a Parisian dilettante, who, according to the Furet de Londres, has been fixing the price of every note and rest in certain pieces played by Paganini recently, at a concert given at the Opera at Paris, which produced him 16,500 francs.  The following is the result:—­He performed, during the evening, three pieces, each occupying five pages of music, of about 91 bars to the page.  The fifteen pages thus contained 1,365 bars, by which the 16,500 francs are to be divided.  The quotient will be 12 francs for each bar, or the proportions will be as follows:—­For a semibreve, 12f.; a minim 6f.; a crotchet, 3f.; a quaver, 1f. 50c.; a semiquaver, 15 sous; a demisemiquaver, 7-1/2 sous.  And, on the other hand, for a minim rest, 6f.; a crotchet rest, 3f.; &c.  There would still remain out of the 16,500 francs, 420, which is exactly the price of such a violin as the Conservatory awards as a prize to its most distinguished pupils.

All this may be play to Paganini, but destruction to less fortunate musicians, for he swallows up all that would otherwise be distributed among many.  An English violinist must work many long laborious days and nights before he can scrape together six hundred and eighty-seven pounds sterling—­the sum, it seems, which the lucky Italian gets by a single concert!—­Ibid.

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THE SELECTOR AND LITERARY NOTICES OF NEW WORKS.

FREEMASONRY.

In a neat volume, called The Freemasons’ Pocket Companion, of size to fit the waistcoat pocket, we find the following brief sketch of the History of Freemasonry in England.  This little Manual is “By a Brother of the Apollo Lodge, 711, Oxford,” who acknowledges his obligation to Oliver and Preston, an article on Masonry, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, &c.:—­