the pianoforte. Like Malaprop's Cerberus, he was three gentlemen at once. The entertainment was novel and interesting. Mr. Hatton gave some capital specimens of pianoforte music by various masters including Corelli, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, etc. He sang songs comic, sentimental, and serious. He levied contributions upon many nations for their compositions, and kept his audience alternately moved with delight and excited with laughter. Mr Hatton was modest enough not to obtrude too many of his own works upon his visitors. 'The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe', a song intended, no doubt, to be very comic, was the only composition of Mr Hatton's performed during the evening." Although differing in that – on that occasion – Hatton did not perform many of his own compositions, this style of one-man entertainment with speech, songs and a keyboard with accessories had been pioneered by Charles Dibdin more than fifty years previously, in his Entertainments Sans Souci: Hatton was certainly well aware of the example of Dibdin. First American tour From 1848 to 1850 Hatton was in America, and in 1848 gave several public and private concerts in New York City. For example, on 12 September, at the Apollo Theatre, he performed his own comic songs as well as works by Handel, Field and Scarlatti. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in that year, he shared the stage with Stephen C. Foster. "Contemporary [American] critics deplored the failure of the public to appreciate his great art." He did pander to the public on occasion: in Boston, where he obtained a position in the Handel and Haydn Society, he performed Bach Fugues and a Mendelssohn piano concerto, but also sang "Christmas Sleigh Ride" while he played the piano and jangled sleigh bells, all to the great amusement of the crowd. It is said that on the next day he was due to conduct a performance of Mendelssohn's Elijah (first performed 1846) at which, the baritone being indisposed, Hatton in the relevant numbers turned to face the audience from the conductor's podium and sang the title role himself. Song-writer and accompanist Hatton composed various songs to poems by Robert Herrick (including his famous "To Anthea"), Ben Jonson and Charles Sedley at this time which were published in and before 1850. Others became the property of Thomas Oliphant. In his August 1850 Preface, Hatton says that they were written 'at different times under various circumstances. Some few of them were