INTHODUCTION. 21 



cient poets associated the music of the shepherds with their 

 chief amusement and pleasure. The pastures on which the 

 sheep fed, consisted of immense plains, or occasionally of 

 abrupt alternations of hill and vale, with many a tangled copse 

 and forest, so that the sheep, or a portion of them, were of- 

 ten out of the sight of the keeper, and occasionally beyond 

 the reach of his voice ; he therefore had a horn, or pipe, 

 by means of which he could be heard at a greater distance, 

 and the well-known sounds of which the leaders of the flock 

 would immediately obey. To while away the time, he would, 

 perhaps, occasionally endeavor to draw other and more 

 pleasing sounds from this instrument necessary to his vo- 

 cation, and thus he would naturally, or almost necessarily, 

 become, to a greater or less degree, a musician ; therefore the 

 interesting stories of the poets are not all fictions ; and it can 

 easily be imagined that the shepherd would often be found play- 

 ing on his pipe in the midst of his flock, and they apparently 

 attentive to, and pleased with, the strain, for they would 

 have suflicient intelligence to associate with it a sense of the 

 kindness and protection they experienced from the player. 



Goldsmith, in his ' Animated Nature,' alludes to the 

 subject : — " Before I had seen them trained in this manner, 

 I had no conception of those descriptions in the old pastoral 

 poets, of the shepherd leading his flock from one country to 

 another. As I had been used to see these harmless crea- 

 tures driven before their keepers, I supposed that all the rest 

 was pure invention ; but in many parts of the Alps, and even 

 some provinces of France, the shepherd and his pipe are 

 still continued with true antique simplicity. The flock is 

 regularly penned every evening, to preserve them from the 

 wolf, and the shepherd returns homeward at sunset with his 

 sheep following him, and seemingly pleased with the sound 

 of his pipe, which is blown with a reed, and resembles the 

 chanter of a bagpipe." 



The Bible aflbrds undoubted evidence of the fact that it 

 was customary with the ancient shepherds to cleanse or 

 wash their sheep before they were shorn. 



Solomon, as has been already observed, compared the 

 teeth of his mistress to a jiock of sheep just come up from 

 the washing. These early records, however, do not speak 

 of the manner in which the operation was performed ; but 

 the inference is, that inasmuch as sheep constituted the 

 chief riches of the people, and were objects of so much 



