The eighteenth century Author:Alexander Andrews Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. MARRIAGE AND FUNERAL CUSTOMS. In traversing the streets of London, it was no uncommon sight to see a mob collected before a respectable house m... more »aking the most discordant din imaginable; some with musical instruments, others with marrow-bones and cleavers, and the rest with tin-kettles, saucepans, shovels, or any implement on which they could lay their hands, and from which they might produce a sonorous noise. This was the "rough music" which always serenaded a newly-married couple, and which, although still jealously kept up in some country districts, is nearly banished from the metropolis. Hogarth, in the " Marriage of the Industrious Apprentice to his Master's Daughter" (Industry and Idleness), gives us an excellent representation of one of these scenes. The cripple known as " Philip in the Tub," who is introduced into the group, was a general attendant upon the rough music, and seldom failed to be present at a wedding. This print gave birth to the following remarks upon the practice by M. Lichtenberg, a German commentator on Hogarth: " It is the custom in England, or at least in London, for the butchers to make, before the houses of the newly-married on the morningafter the wedding, if they think it will pay them for their trouble, a kind of wild Janissary music. They perform it by striking their cleavers with the marrow-bones of the animals they have slain. To comprehend that this music is—we shall not say supportable, for that is not here the question—but that it is not entirely objectionable, we shall observe that the breadth of the English cleaver is to that of the German nearly in the same proportion as the diameter of the English ox is to that of Germany. When, therefore, properly struck, they produce no despicable clang—at least, certainly a better one t...« less