Mr. Gladstone has been addressing pleasant speeches to the various
bands which performed on his terrace daring the Hawarden fete, and on Wednesday especially assured his hearers that almost all men had the capacity for music in them, though that capacity had, till within the last few years, been so seldom called out. To the Welsh especially he attributed the most marked national gift for music, which we are quite ready to believe in on his authority ; but we wish it would enter enough into their souls to modulate their too often very discordant speech. But as to Mr. Gladstone's assurance that almost all men have a latent capuity for musical accomplishment, we cannot but fear that his experi- ence has not been wide enough to establish so great a thesis. Within the walls in which we write we could find him three men at least with an incapacity for music quite as remark- able as the incapacity of a rhinoceros for dancing or of a butterfly for swimming. And we have even known not a few women who after many years of fruitless discipline on the piano and in singing, have given up the study of music in absolute despair. There are inborn incapacities for the arts quite as deeply rooted and as widely distributed as the corresponding gifts.
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