On the principles and practice of just Intonation, with a view to the abolition of temperament...By General Perronet Thompson.[...]Sixth Edition. London, 1862, 8vo.
Here is General Thompson again, with another paradox : []ot always master of the subject, always well up in what []is predecessors have done, and always aimed at a useful []nd. He desires to abolish temperament by additional keys, []nd has constructed an enharmonic organ with forty sounds []n the octave. If this can be introduced, I, for one, shall []elight ot hear it : but there are very great difficulties in the way, greater than stood even in hte way of the repeal of the []read-tax.
In a paper on the beats of organ-pipes and on temperament published some years ago, I said that equal temperament appeared to me insipid, and not so agreeable as the effect of the instrument when in progress towards being what is called out of tune, before it becomes offensively wrong. There is throughout that period unequal temperament, determined by accident. General Thompson, taking me one way, says I have launched a declaration which is likely to make an epoch in musical practice ; a public musical critic, taking me another way, quizzes me for preferring music out of tune. I do not think I deserve either one remark or the other. My opponent critic, I suspect, takes equally tempered and in tune to be phrases of one meaning. But by equal temperament is meant equal distribution among all the keys of the errors which an instrument must have, which, with twelve sounds only in the octave, professes to be fit for all the keys. I am reminded of the equal temperament which was once applied to the postmen's jackets. The coats were all made for the average man : the consequence was that all the tall maen had their tails too short ; all the short men had them too long. Some one innocently asked why the tall men did not change coats with the short ones.