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Flute-playing and chariot races were his main diversions, and every public interest was sacrificed to his pleasures, or his vengeance a man delighting in evil for its own sake. Nero was succeeded by Galba, who also was governed by favorites. He was a great glutton, exceedingly parsimonious, and very unpopular.
"It would have been nice," he thought, "if, instead of heating engines here, I had become an artist, as Elsbeth used to prophesy." A thrill of excitement went through him. "Will she live again? Will she?" He extracted another shrill sound from the flute. "B-r-r," he said, "that goes through one's nerves! I shall have to leave love and flute-playing to others."
A combination of rhythm and harmony alone is the means in flute-playing and lyre-playing, and any other arts there may be of the same description, e.g. imitative piping. Rhythm alone, without harmony, is the means in the dancer's imitations; for even he, by the rhythms of his attitudes, may represent men's characters, as well as what they do and suffer.
The first movement in his new progress was the lambing of his ewes, and sheep having been his speciality from his youth, he wisely refrained from deputing the task of tending them at this season to a hireling or a novice. The wind continued to beat about the corners of the hut, but the flute-playing ceased.
In his pocket was that which might procure a night's lodging or a meagre supper; but it would not supply both. He had to decide between the two, unless he elected to go on playing till midnight in the drenching rain on the chance of augmenting his scanty store. Though it was June, he was chilled to the bone. In the intervals between his flute-playing his teeth chattered.
Even in dancing, flute-playing, and lyre-playing such diversities are possible; and they are also possible in the nameless art that uses language, prose or verse without harmony, as its means; Homer's personages, for instance, are better than we are; Cleophon's are on our own level; and those of Hegemon of Thasos, the first writer of parodies, and Nicochares, the author of the Diliad, are beneath it.
Under a management which could announce a Greek agon with flute-playing, choirs of dancers, tragedians, and athletes, and eventually convert it into a boxing-match; and in presence of a public which, as later poets complain, ran away en masse from the play, if there were pugilists, or rope-dancers, or even gladiators to be seen; poets such as the Roman composers were workers for hire and of inferior social position were obliged even perhaps against their own better judgment and their own better taste to accommodate themselves more or less to the prevailing frivolity and rudeness.
In "David Copperfield," Dickens describes a certain flute-playing tutor, by the name of Mell, concerning whom, and the rest of mankind, he expresses the rash opinion, "after many years of reflection," that "nobody ever could have played worse."
Yet even more clearly may this be shown from the fact that the Pleasures arising from one kind of Workings hinder other Workings; for instance, people who are fond of flute-music cannot keep their attention to conversation or discourse when they catch the sound of a flute; because they take more Pleasure in flute-playing than in the Working they are at the time engaged on; in other words, the Pleasure attendant on flute-playing destroys the Working of conversation or discourse.
They are inseparable companions; one would almost suppose that, although Mr. Miles never by any chance does anything in the way of assistance, Jack could do nothing without him. Whether he is reading, writing, painting, carpentering, gardening, flute-playing, or what not, there is Mr.
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