Samuel Johnson would have enjoyed the truly Quixotic irony that, however scholars tilt at the windmill of the Johnson myth, it stubbornly persists. His misogyny is as firmly established in the public mind as his “amorous propensities”behind the scenes of Garrick's theatre. At best, he is seen as patronizing the “pretty dears.” The most familiar pronouncement seems to say it all: “Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprized to find it done at all” (Life, i, 463). Less well known but certainly more representative is Johnson's assertion that “Men know that women are an over-match for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves” (v, 226). Unsurprisingly, Johnson does share with his contemporaries firm ideas on the demarcation between the genders, but he demonstrates in his writing an extraordinary sympathy with women. Showing the limitations imposed on them by social conditions, he consistently advocates their education, and places a supreme value on “female” qualities of tenderness, gentleness, and emotional responsibility, for both men and women.

It is impossible adequately to understand or appreciate Johnson the author without seriously considering Johnson the Christian believer and theological thinker. From the time Johnson first read William Law's Serious Call at the age of twenty, Boswell tells us, “religion was the predominant object of his thoughts” (Life, i, 69-70). Another early biographer, Sir John Hawkins, examined the plan of study Johnson composed at Pembroke College, Oxford, and concluded: “his favourite subjects were classical literature, ethics, and theology” (Hawkins, p. 11). Johnson's first book, a translation of a French edition of the Portuguese Jesuit Jerome Lobo's A Voyage to Abyssinia (1735), reveals his willingness to engage with the theological and religious debates of the seventeenth century.

A further sign of Johnson's early theological inclination is the fact that the second project he ever proposed to Edward Cave, editor of the Gentleman's Magazine, was a new translation of a long, complex, and heavily annotated theological work: Paolo Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent (Letters, 1, 12—13). This work immersed him in the most contentious theological issues of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation: sacramental theology, ecclesiastical polity, apostolic succession, and justification by faith alone. Because of competition from another translator, Johnson eventually abandoned the project in April 1739, though not until he had already produced between 400 and 800 quarto pages of translation and commentary over the course of nine months.

The most infamous evaluation of Samuel Johnson's literary ceuvre is the broad attack launched by Thomas Babington Macaulay, in his Encyclopedia Britannica article of 1856. Macaulay's assessment stands soundly rejected today. Yet what was really at stake in his attack - the discomfort of a Whig historiographer and colonial administrator with the universalist thought of Johnson - is seldom fully understood. Macaulay's views about Johnson's Rasselas thus bear quoting at some length:

THE POSE OF INTENSITY AND THE CULT OF AESTHETIC RESPONSE IN THE 1880s AND 1890s

When Oscar Wilde first rediscovered and began to write in Pen, Pencil and Poison' of the life and opinions of the Regency painter, belletrist, convicted forger and 'subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival', Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, he found revealed in the character of this artistic and intellectual dandy not only an aspect of his own nature and genius, but also, perhaps, the key to an essential quality of the Aesthetic and Decadent sensibility as it developed in England in the 1880s and 90s. That quality we might define as a Dandyism of the Senses - a self-consciously precious and highly fastidious discrimination brought to bear on both art and life. The dandy-aesthetes of the fin-de-siècle period above all honed their senses and cultivated the rarest of sensibilities; they made the perfection of the pose of exquisiteness their greatest aim and they directed all their languid energies towards nurturing a cult of aesthetic response that begins beyond ordinary notions of taste, that lies beyond mere considerations of fashion, and operates quite outside the dictates of all conventional canons of morality.

Wilde was perhaps the first to perceive that this very specific sensibility had been intriguingly foreshadowed by the ideas and opinions enshrined in Wainewright's precociously brilliant art-journalism of the early years of the nineteenth century; in particular in those essays in which the mercurial dandy-critic first adumbrated his own idiosyncratic version of a pose of exquisite sensibility and the notion of a cult of aesthetic response.

If Oscar Wilde is remembered for anything since his turn-of-the-century demise, it is his meteoric rise as a raconteur, playwright and cultural critic, and his startlingly rapid fall into disrepute as a homosexual committed to two years in solitary confinement with hard labour in Reading Gaol. Since this memorable story has been told so many times and in so many versions - not least in his own work of life writing, posthumously named De Profundis, and in biographies as notable and substantial as Richard Ellmann's - one would reasonably imagine that we must now know all there is to discover about Wilde's scandalous sexual behaviour, not to say the imprint of transgressive desire across the gamut of his works. Indeed, the enduring interest in his life and writings - from Peter Ackroyd's fictional The Last Will and Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983) to Philip Prowse's visually arresting productions of the Society comedies - suggests that Wilde addresses issues that still vibrantly preoccupy our own fin de siecle, particularly where questions of sexual identity are concerned. This is especially the case in the world of scholarly research where the upsurge of critical attention paid to Wilde's oeuvre has risen sharply in the light of a burgeoning lesbian and gay studies since the mid-1980s. Such developments have meant that academic readers are now altogether freer in articulating the homoerotic patternings that would seem to inflect his writings from beginning to end.

Scholars writing about Johnson like to point out, correctly, that he wrote more on politics than most readers suppose. In a broad sense it can be argued that all writing implies a politics, but Johnson's engagement with politics in one way or another is coterminous with his professional life as a writer. Writers were less specialized in the eighteenth century than they have become, and “literature” had a broader signification. Apart from Johnson's late work as political pamphleteer, whether as journalist, satirist, essayist, lexicographer, book reviewer, sermon-writer, biographer, throughout his career many of Johnson's writings directly engage politics and others touch upon politics in a range of ways. This essay will trace the broad outline of Johnson's political opinions and make particular observations on some of his political writings.

“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford.” Johnson made this famous declaration in 1777, but he had already said something similar to James Boswell on 11 October 1773 whilst they were both temporarily marooned on the island of Coll in the Hebrides. Boswell had commented that until their joint expedition, “You yourself, sir, had never seen, till now, any thing but your native island,” to which Johnson replied “But, Sir, by seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can shew.” It seems clear that “life” in these pronouncements cannot mean whatever it was that Johnson had come to the Hebrides to see. London could encapsulate “life” because life everywhere – that is to say human character – is the same. London’s social and cultural diversity, the richness of its human resources, means that it is the perfect laboratory for the study of human nature. Johnson’s remarks can be read as testimony not only to his love of the city, but to his conviction that human beings are alike everywhere, the same, in fact, in London as (to use his phrase at the opening of The Vanity of Human Wishes) “from China to Peru.” What then had taken him to the highlands of Scotland?

Throughout the ages the horn has been inextricably linked with hunting, an extra-musical association that coloured its use in music during the Baroque and Classical periods. Early on, the horn was employed in fanfares for hunting scenes in stage works such as Michelangelo Rossi's Erminia sul Giordano (Rome, 1633), Francesco Cavalli's Le nozze di Teti e di Peleo (Venice, 1639) and Jean-Baptiste Lully's La Princesse d'Elide (Versailles, 1664). Though it is not known if the horns used in these works were of the tightly wound helical or the more modern single-coil variety, they had essentially the same range and harmonic-series pitchgamut as the trumpet. This is illustrated in the Sonata da caccia con un Cornuy c. l670, written by an anonymous Bohemian composer for strings and horn in C alto – at the same pitch as the trumpet in C.

A crucial step in the evolution of the horn was its further differentiation from the trumpet (a differentiation that continued throughout the eighteenth century) as its tube length became longer, with a larger hoop and wider bell, resulting in a lower compass and a deeper, more sonorous tone. It was only after this maturation that composers requested the horn regularly in art music. The larger cor de chasse, associated with the mounted Parforce hunt, is generally thought to have appeared in France by 1680 during the reign of Louis XIV, first as a single-coiled horn in C alto, then a double-coiled horn at lower pitches.

This remained the situation with brass instruments in the late eighteenth century (and in some places even in the twentieth). The trombone was the sole exception. Praetorius illustrated both bass and contrabass trombones in Syntagma musicum(1619). However, the latter instrument was seldom used.

Towards the end of the fifteenth century another lip-reed instrument which could play as low as the bass trombone, the bassoon and the cello had appeared. This was the serpent, invented by Edmé Guillaume of Auxerre to accompany plainchant. Its mouthpiece is inserted into a bent brass crook which in turn enters a wooden tube. In a length of some 210 cm. this tube expands from a diameter of 2 cm. to a bell of about 10 cm. Its range of two and a half octaves from C2 was ample for plainchant, the slow tempo of which gave the player time to pitch each note beforehand. The pitch of the serpent tends to be unstable owing to its wide conicity and the position of the six finger holes along its ‘S’-shaped tube which are placed conveniently for the three middle fingers of each hand, rather than in accordance with acoustic requirements. When military bands adopted the serpent in the late eighteenth century three keys were fitted, giving improved Bs, C♯s and F♯s. The serpent militaire was also more robustly constructed than the serpent d'église. At the same time, bassoon-shaped serpents appeared.

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries provided warm ground for the seeds of experimentation in brass instrument technology. Serpents and their latter-day relatives, the bass horns and basson russe, were proof that vented brasses were viable musical instruments. The need for fully chromatic brass increased as performers, instrument makers and audiences felt the need to find instruments that would suit the new music. A distinctly different sort of brass musician produced that music. For example, the training of Anton Weidinger as a guild apprentice serves in sharp contrast to the democratic self-instruction exemplified by the careers of the keyed bugle and ophicleide players that followed him.

Early keyed horns and trumpets

Ferdinand Kölbel and his son-in-law, Hensel, were the earliest documented experimenters with keyed horns, which they called the Amor-Schall. In 1756, they demonstrated two of their instruments for Tsarina Katharina II in St Petersburg. Kölbel's instrument had keys on the bell and on a cross tube. The instrument featured a unique bell in the form of a half sphere. A second half of the sphere with perforations to let the sound out could be attached to this section, and it was the special sound that made the name Amor-Schall appropriate. The instrument had a sound that was, according to one account, ‘a very agreeable blend, from the normal hunting horn, English horn, and the oboe’. The instrument employed a new technique, produced a sound that varied from the mainstream, was difficult to manufacture and attracted few disciples. Horn players preferred the hand-stopping techniques that were already established and widely accepted.

The name ‘cornett’ refers to a family of lip-vibrated finger-hole horns in widespread use from the late fifteenth century to the early nineteenth. Cornetts were made in many forms: they could be either curved or straight, wooden or ivory, covered with leather or left plain, and of either round or octagonal cross-section. However, the dominant form by far, at least from the mid sixteenth century on, was curved, wooden and leather-covered.

The cornett enjoyed a development that was unparalleled both in its rapid ascent and in its subsequent profound decline. No western musical instrument of comparable importance has ever emerged so rapidly from obscurity or plunged into such total eclipse. Though many details of this development remain obscure, the broad sweep of the curve is becoming clear as the modern revival of the cornett, begun in the early 1950s, again focuses interest and scholarship on this instrument, once regarded as, ‘the most excellent of all the wind instruments’.

Early history: ‘Trumpys, taborns and cornettys crye’

The curved form of the cornett, as well as the Latin-derived forms of its name (Latin: cornu; Italian: cornetto; French: cornet à bouquin; English: cornett), clearly link this instrument to an ancestry among the lip-vibrated animal horns widely used since ancient times for signalling. Two important developments were necessary, however, to turn animal horns prepared for blowing, capable of only one or two notes, into musical instruments useful in cultivated music: finger holes had to be added and the bore of the instrument needed to be narrow enough to permit over-blowing.

The late Renaissance (1500–1600)

Trumpeters seem to have enjoyed Imperial protection in the Habsburg empire by the fifteenth century. In 1548, the Imperial Diet of Augsburg decreed that trumpeters and others were allowed to form guilds. The decree was confirmed in 1577, leading to the founding of the Imperial Trumpeters' and Kettledrummers' Guild in 1623.

Three surviving manuscript collections allow an insight into the court trumpeters' military and ceremonial repertoire of the late Renaissance: the notebooks of two German trumpeters at the Danish court, Magnus Thomsen (1596–1609) and Hendrich Lubeck (1598), and a trumpet method, Tutta l'arte della trombetta, compiled in the 1580s and written down in 1614 by the Munich chief court trumpeter, Cesare Bendinelli (c. 1542–1617). All contain exercises, military signals and ensemble pieces.

Monophonic military music to c. 1600

The oldest surviving trumpet signals, codified in Italy during the sixteenth century, were executed in the low register of the trumpet, from the second to the fifth or sixth partial of the harmonic series (C3 to E4 or G4). They were preceded by an introductory ‘toccata’; later a concluding third part was added. Bendinelli remarked that the style of execution should be free, ‘with little regard for the beat’.

Other kinds of monophonic trumpet signals were played at special events such as announcements of university promotions or jury verdicts, or to summon the gentry to table. They were also included in theatre pieces, including many of Shakespeare's plays, where they were called ‘tuckets’ (a word with an obvious etymological connection with ‘toccata’).

The earliest methods of instruction on brass instruments were probably based on imitation; signals and simple ensemble pieces were probably learned by rote. The first documented brotherhood of musicians was the Nicolai-Zechbrüder which was chartered in 1288 in Vienna and functioned until 1782. Five trumpets formed a fraternity in Lucca, also in 1288. The Confrérie de Saint-Julien was founded in 1321 and lasted until 1773. By 1330, musicians' brotherhoods expanded, and thirty-one such organisations met in Tournai to discuss common issues. Not until the written records and apprenticeship indentures of the guilds and Stadtpfeifer become available is there tangible evidence of how instruction actually took place. Members of church or civic ensembles and court musicians are seldom seen in pictures with printed music in front of them. This suggests that the music they were playing was memorised. Keith Polk has described ‘the existence of a tightly interwoven network of contacts which would have connected players and repertory in Glogau, Leipzig, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Ferrara, and Florence, and, for that matter with Brussels, Mechelen and Antwerp’. How did they learn their craft? The possession of a highly developed memory and a talent for improvisation, in addition to the timeless prerequisite of a keen ear, were essential to success as a musician in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance.

Manuscript and printed instruction material survives from the Renaissance. The idiom that brass players followed can be deduced from the works of such writers as Ganassi, Ortiz, Maffei, Dalla Casa, Bassano, Conforti, Bovicelli and Virgiliano. A concise study of the manuals of these writers by Howard Mayor Brown, Embellishing Sixteenth-Century Musky is a good starting point for modern players of early brass instruments, as it provides an overview of sixteenth-century practices. In the seventeenth century, Rognoni continued the discussion of technique and used the model of the human voice as the ideal for wind players to imitate

Early technical developments

The emergence of the brass family as instruments to be used in art music is directly related to their ability to produce sufficient notes in the diatonic scale for melodic accompaniment. This is effected in two ways: either by changing tube length during playing by means of slides so as to fill in the gaps in the lower register, or by increasing tube length to a point where the higher harmonics are available to the player and close enough together that diatonic melodies may be played. Until the higher harmonics could be produced reliably, or the lower harmonics tuned to order, brass instruments were relegated to ceremonial and non-musical roles.

The simplest way of varying tube length is by application of a single slide attached to the mouthpiece. The mouthpiece is held in a set position against the lips while the whole instrument is moved up and down. Several authors cite extensive iconographical and musical evidence for the existence of such an instrument from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and hypothesise on its general dimensions and musical function. Modern reconstructions show that the instrument is at least mechanically and musically feasible. An argument against the existence of an instrument with a single slide has been made, but from the point of view of manufacturing technique it seems more logical that a workable but cumbersome single slide was developed first, and later gave way to an improved double slide as manufacturing techniques improved. Making smooth concentric tubing which would telescope easily enough to allow the use of a single slide was difficult enough in the fourteenth century, without the extra technical demands of making two such tubes work well alongside each other in a double slide.

The dichotomy between the old and the new

The horn had a complex transition from the classical hand-horn to the fully chromatic valved instrument that we know today. The transition was also very gradual and did not follow a logical sequence. This is borne out by the fact that a work as late as Brahms's Horn Trio, Op. 40 for horn, violin and piano (1865), is designed for the hand-horn, while other works of the same period require valves. Another illustration of the co-existence of the valve horn and the hand-horn is demonstrated by the fact that the Paris Conservatoire offered hand-horn classes into the twentieth century. The valve horn class was actually suspended temporarily in 1864. French composers (notably Debussy and Ravel) seemed far more concerned with the minute details of orchestral colour and ‘pointillism’ well into the twentieth century, while the Austro-German composers (even Brahms, who favoured the hand-horn) were much more concerned with structure and motivic coherence; it is, therefore, understandable that French composers and writers showed the most concern over the loss of the range of colours that the hand-horn had to offer. Nineteenth-century music was, however, to be dominated by the Austro-Germans, and the ‘modern’ use of the valves for all notes was to be the way forward. Differences in attitude were, however, to cause problems. David Charlton has pointed out that, ‘By about 1860 [horn] technique was in a transitional and confusing state.’