King James I., upon what beneficial principle it is now difficult to
discover, by letters-patent incorporated the musicians of the city of
London into a company, and they still continue to enjoy privileges in
consequence of their constituting a fraternity and corporation; bearing
arms azure, a swan, argent, within a tressure counter-flure, or: in a
chief, gules, a rose between two lions, or: and for their crest the
celestial sign Lyra, called by astronomers the Orphean Lyre. Unluckily
for the _bon-vivans_ of this tuneful tribe, they have no hall in the
city for festive delights! However, on days of greatest _gourmandise_,
the members of this body are generally too busily employed in
exhilarating others, comfortably to enjoy the fruits of good living
themselves. And here historical integrity obliges me to say, that this
company has ever been held in derision by real professors, who have
regarded it as an institution as foreign to the cultivation and
prosperity of good music, as the train-bands to the art of war. Indeed,
the only uses that have hitherto been made of this charter seem the
affording to aliens an easy and cheap expedient of acquiring the freedom
of the city, and enabling them to pursue some more profitable and
respectable trade than that of fiddling; as well as empowering the
company to keep out of processions, and city-feasts, every street and
country-dance player, of superior abilities to those who have the honour
of being styled the “_Waits of the corporation_.”[60]
* * * * *