It is quite likely, indeed, that an audience of silly maiden ladies in the middle west, unaccomplished in the skill of tones, hearing little music, applauds delightedly this soft sobbery. Two often apposite lines, however, I have never come upon in music criticism. This, from W. B. Yeats's King and No King, would certainly fit many a singer: "Would it were anything but merely voice!" and sometimes, after a few days of shameless concert-going with a friend from out of town, I feel tempted to reassure him, Calibanwise: "Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises."
Our second critic approaches his task with more sobriety of expression. He believes it to be his bounden, and unenlivening, duty to avoid florid language in his dismal effort to impress his readers with the sublime seriousness of the art he so laboriously strives to hold within academically prescribed limits. His erudite style bristles with adverbial clauses, with technical conjurations, abjurations, and apostrophes. He summons the eleven dull devils of dusty knowledge to his aid in his consistent endeavour to be accurate and just. He never deals in metaphor, never in simile; no figures of speech whatever sully the dead drab of his columns; he would consider them, if he thought about the matter at all, cheapening influences, encroaching on the drowsy preserves of his somnolent profession. With
