Prose References
In the end he suggests a marriage between the flute and the lute.
Oliver Goldsmith as a youth used to play the flute accompanied by Miss Contarine on the harpsichord. He himself tells us he was but an indifferent performer, and when insulted he used to relieve his feelings by blowing into it "with a kind of desperate, mechanical vehemence." During his wanderings over Europe in 1755 he more or less supported himself by means of his flute. He recalls in The Traveller how he "lipped his flute in France." Under the name of George Primrose in The Vicar of Wakefield he describes how—
"Whenever I approached a peasant's house [in France] towards nightfall, I played one of my most merry tunes, and that procured me not only a lodging, but subsistence for the next day. I once or twice attempted to play for people of fashion, but they always thought my performance odious, and never rewarded me even with a trifle."
An American writer has said that the fable of the playing of Marsyas teaches us how to treat young men who play on the flute, and certainly severalFlute inModern
Novelists modern novelists seem to regard the instrument chiefly as a subject of ridicule. They dwell principally upon its melancholy aspect. Dickens is the chief offender in this respect, but his humour excuses him. How delightful is the description of Mr. Mell, the mild schoolmaster (the assistant-master in Thackeray's Doctor Birch also plays the German flute) in David Copperfield, "a gaunt, sallow young man with hollow cheeks," who carried his flute in three
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