More Poetical References
for "the minstrels" of the authorised version (Matthew, ix. 23). In Revelations (xviii. 22) the revised version again reads "flute-players" where the authorised version read "pipers." The only instance of the word "flute" in the authorised version is in the account of Nebuchadnezzar's orchestra in Daniel, iii. (where pan-pipes or else a double flute is intended), but in I. Kings (i. 40) the word "pipes" has a marginal reading "flutes."
Browning's references to the instrument are somewhat contemptuous. He speaks of a "fife-shriek," and of a candlestick-maker blowing his brainsOther
Poets into a flute (Shop), and in Up at a Villa he has "bang-whang-whang goes the drum, tootle-te-tootle the fife," which recalls the delicious description of the tuning of the orchestra in Smith's Rejected Addresses—
Tang goes the harpsichord, too-too the flute."
The fascination of rhyming "flute" with "lute" seems irresistible; it occurs in innumerable instances. One of the latest is in Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol, ii. g. Tennyson says, "Knaves are men that lute and flute fantastic tenderness" (The Princess, iv.).
Leigh Hunt in The Fancy Concert has a somewhat similar passage beginning "Flageolets one by one, and flutes blowing more fast." Robert L. Stevenson was very fond of playing his flute "to tune up his ideas," and refers to it several times in the New Arabian Nights237
