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Updated: May 4, 2025
"I have a perfect horror of pianos," Frémecourt said, "of those hateful boxes that fill up a drawing-room, and which have not even the soft sound and the queer shape of the mahogany or veneered spinets, to which our grandmothers sighed out exquisite, long-forgotten ballads, and allowed their fingers to run over the keys, while around them there floated a delicate odor of powder and muslin, and some little Abbé or other turned over the leaves, and was continually making mistakes, as he was looking at the patches close to the lips on the white skin of the player instead of at the music.
The old spinets and harpsichords, with their charming inlaid cases, were beautiful, but they gave forth only tinkly sounds. Now we have a magnificent mechanism, but the case which encloses it is too often hideous.
But about that couch, George. Don't you think Empire might be better than Heppelwhite? Dull gold against that pale green? It's a pity they don't make spinets nowadays." "I believe you can get them. Look at that oak wood behind the pines."
"We must try all means," replied Jeanie; "but writing winna do it a letter canna look, and pray, and beg, and beseech, as the human voice can do to the human heart. A letter's like the music that the ladies have for their spinets naething but black scores, compared to the same tune played or sung. It's word of mouth maun do it, or naething, Reuben."
This can be done through the piano factory; but in the case of redecorating a room, one can easily get some independent artist to do this work, a man who has made a study of the decorations on old spinets in palaces, private mansions and museums.
"We must try all means," replied Jeanie; "but writing winna do it a letter canna look, and pray, and beg, and beseech, as the human voice can do to the human heart. A letter's like the music that the ladies have for their spinets naething but black scores, compared to the same tune played or sung. It's word of mouth maun do it, or naething, Reuben."
During the eighteenth century, when Edinburgh was almost more completely the centre of society than ever before, the old tunes were sung by ladies as much as by maid-servants, and the delicate old spinets performed a soft accompaniment to ballads of the "Ewebuchting" and of the "Corn Rigs," and prolonged the pathetic notes of "Waly, waly" and the trembling wail of the "Flowers of the Forest" in the finest houses as in the humblest.
No mathematical instrument maker was to be found in Glasgow, but Watt entered the service of a kind of jack-of-all-trades, who called himself an "optician" and sold and mended spectacles, repaired fiddles, tuned spinets, made fishing-rods and tackle, etc.
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