He could not afford to waste paper upon his original compositions.
Mary's delight was great when first he brought her one of his compositions very fairly written out--after which others followed with a rapidity that astonished her.
These compositions were usually written for the harpsichord and perhaps three instruments of the viol order, the master himself playing the leading melody on the violin.
--This is the reason, may it please your reverences, that some of the lowest and flattest compositions pass off very well--(as Yorick told my uncle Toby one night) by siege.--My uncle Toby looked brisk at the sound of the word siege, but could make neither head or tail of it.
Even the sound of someone in the street below whistling one of his old compositions, of which he had heartily sickened twelve months before, was pleasant to his ears, and this in spite of the fact that the unseen whistler only touched the key in odd spots and had a poor memory for tunes.
He wrote, for his own amusement and edification, essays on politics, of which gentlemen of standing who had been favored with a perusal said with authority, at the cross-roads grocery, "The world can't beat it." One or two of these compositions got into print and vastly increased the author's local fame.
Assuredly they will not be disturbed either by the lays of a poet displaying the exaggeration of his craft, or by the compositions of the chroniclers that are attractive at truth's expense; the subjects they treat of being out of the reach of evidence, and time having robbed most of them of historical value by enthroning them in the region of legend.