Dr. Arne, professionally, has been fully portrayed by the pupil who, nominally, was under his guidance; but who, in after-times, became the historian of his tuneful art.
Eminent, however, in that art as was Dr. Arne, his eminence was to that art alone confined. Thoughtless, dissipated, and careless, he neglected, or rather scoffed at all other but musical reputation. And he was so little scrupulous in his ideas of propriety, that he took pride, rather than shame, in being publicly classed, even in the decline of life, as a man of pleasure.
Such a character was ill qualified to form or to protect the morals of a youthful pupil; and it is probable that not a notion of such a duty ever occurred to Dr. Arne; so happy was his self-complacency in the fertility of his invention and the
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ease of his compositions, and so dazzled by the brilliancy of his success in his powers of melody—which, in truth, for the English stage, were in sweetness and variety unrivalled—that, satisfied and flattered by the practical exertions and the popularity of his fancy, he had no ambit............