EVOLUTION OF JMUSIC AND POETKr. 25 



we read that the triumphal ode composed by Moses on the 

 defeat of the Egyptians, was sung to an accompaniment of 

 dancing^ and timbrels. The Israelites danced and sunoj " at 

 the inauguration of the golden calf. And as it is generally 

 agreed that this representation of the Deity was borrowed 

 from the mysteries of Apis, it is i)robable that the dancing 

 was copied from that of the Egyptians on those occasions." 

 There was an annual dance in Shiloh on the sacred festival ; 

 and David danced before the ark. Again, in Greece the 

 like relation is everywhere seen : the original type being 

 there, as probably in other cases, a simultaneous chanting 

 and mimetic representation of the life and adventures of 

 the god. The Spartan dances were accompanied by hymns 

 and songs ; and in general the Greeks had " no festivals or 

 religious assemblies but what were accompanied with songs 

 and dances " — both of them being forms of worship used 

 before altars. Among the Romans, too, there were sacred 

 dances : the Salian and Lupercalian being named as of 

 that kind. And even in Christian countries, as at Limoges, 

 in comparatively recent times, the people have danced in 

 the choir in honour of a saint. The incipient separation 

 of these once united arts from each other and from reli- 

 gion, was early visible in Greece. Probably diverging from 

 dances partly religious, partly warlike, as the Coiybantian, 

 came the war dances proj^er, of which there were various 

 kinds ; and from these resulted secular dances. Mean- 

 while Music and Poetry, though still united, came to have 

 an existence separate from dancing. The aboriginal Greek 

 poems, religious in subject, were not recited, but chanted ; 

 and though at first the chant of the poet Avas accompanied 

 by the dance of the chorus, it ultimately grew into inde- 

 pendence. Later still, when the poem had been differen- 

 tiated into epic and lyric — when it became the custom to 

 sing the lyric and recite the epic — poetry proper was born. 

 As during the same period musical instruments were being 

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