The Piano-Forte

       A hundred years ago and to what a growth has that new instrument attained! Then it was comparatively of rude manufacture, a slender case, standing on slight supports, and with keys tinkling like a music-box, and scarcely so much like the modern piano-forte as the little tea-kettle engine with which the inventors first ran over the road is like the ponderous locomotive of the present day that bites the rail as it thunders on with a planetary tread.

       There had been one or two pianos, though, nearly seventy years before that era, but so very imperfect that it took a multitude of new ideas, improvements and patents to bring even the perfection cf the one of 1776. Still some of the great composers had written wonderful music for the instrument even in that crude state, whether satisfied with it or foreseeing its advance. And from what it had advanced! The timbrel, the dulcimer, the clavichord, the spinet, the harpsichord, the harp itself, each contributed its separate idea to the composition of the wonderful mechanism on which Mr. Dibdin played that day, and which has advanced so much farther now that it seems to be as perfect as an instrument that does not meet the pure euharmonic scale can hope to be, and that stands, when its lid is closed, as some one has described it, like the sarcophagus of unrisen music, and whose manufacture, moreover, has reached in London alone an average of more than a hundred thousand instruments a year, produced by some two hundred makers, and giving employment and livelihood, of course, to an immense train of workmen and their families.

       It is interesting to note how many various countries enter the lists in cataring for our daily music and in finishing the case and works. Take, for instance, a fine Erard. Switzerland has sent the fir, Norway the deal, England the pear and sycamore and holly wood and the iron, Riga the oak, the tropical forests of Honduras the mahogany, and of South America the cedar; from Ceylon comes the ebony, from Rio the rosewood, from India the satin-wood, from Africa the ivory, from Russia the leather, from America the pine, and copper and silver and cloth from almost every meridian. And all this is brought together; for this great minds have wrestled, great minds have written, and all to delight the heart of the little miss who longs to rattle off her notes as she sees her elders do it, and breaks her little back for hours every day in the effort.

       And why not? Why should not great minds write and wrestle for such results? Is there any better result than that of bringing the pleasure into the household that this instrument does? As you sit and hear it and look about on the group of pleased listeners, you think it equal to a hearth any day in its power to 'gather and to cheer; and it has seemed to me in certain family circles where the members clustered round the piano-forte as a center that it was a sort of household altar at whose shrine the family assembled, and where the father looks on his little daughter, who can evoke this magic, as on something too precious and perfect to be his, and that the moral health and refinement of the whole household are assisted by the music, no matter how imperfect it may be when measured by great standards; and I have thought that every child ought to feel repaid for all her toil in the happiness she affords the fond father and mother in these hours of their satisfaction. 

 The first pianos.