138 



the tenderest feelings of grief and compunction for 

 what he had done. Jamblicus relates like extraurdi. 

 nary effects of the lyres of Pythagoras and Empedo- 

 cles. The painter Theon dextrously availed himself 

 of this force of music, when going to make a piece he 

 had finished, wherein a soldier was represented as just 

 ready to assail the enemy, he first of all warmed the 

 spirit of the company by a warlike air, and when he 

 lound them sufficiently animated, uncovered the pic- 

 ture, which struck the whole assembly with admira- 

 tion. Plutarch informs us of a sedition quelled at 

 Laeedemon by the lyre of Terpander ; and Boctius 

 of rioters dispersed by the musician Damon. 



21- To conclude this inquiry respecting the merit 

 of the ancients in music, i shall make but two obser- 

 vations. The first is, that thdr airs in delicacy very 

 touch surpassed ours, and that it is in this respect 

 principally, that we may be said to have lost their mu- 

 sic. Of their three kinds of music, the diatonic,, chro- 

 matic, and the enharmonic, there exists now only th 

 first* and second. The difficulty there was to find 

 voices and hands proper to execute the enharmonic 

 kind, brought it first into tiegl.-.ct, a.id then into obli- 

 vion : insomuch that ail now remaining of the a-iricnt 

 music is that coarser sort, which knows no other re- 

 finement, than that of the whole and the (U-minote, 

 instead of these finer kinds, which carried on the divi. 

 sion of a note into threes and fours. Doub.'le.-s the 

 jjrevalency of that system, which referred the deter* 

 urination of sounds to the judgment 91 the car, occa- 

 sioned the rejection of the enharmonic species, wiiich 

 was too fine for the decision of the ear. and sprung 

 entirely from the Pythagoric system. But this by no 

 means ought to hinder us from acknowledging the ex- 

 cellency of that music above the modern, in the ex- 



# Dntens is mistaken in saying, first, that only the first, viz. the 

 diatonic kind, now remains ; and, secondly, that this divides the 

 tones into semiton- s ; vhi:h certainly is done by the chromatic, 

 and. not the diatomc scale. 



