op the Hindis.- 6V 



why each of the feven colours in the rainbow, where a proportion, analo- 

 gous to that of mufical founds, moil: wonderfully prevails, has a certain 

 fpecifick effect on our eyes • why the fh.ades of green and blue, for inftance, 

 are foft and foothing, while thofe of red and yellow diftrefs and dazzle 

 the fight; but, without ftriving to account for the phenomena, let us be 

 fattened with knowing, that fome of the modes have diftinct perceptible 

 properties, and m ay be applied to the expreifion of various mental emo- 

 tions; a fact, which ou-ht well to be confidered by thofe performers,, 

 who would reduce them all to. a dull uniformity, and facrince the true beau- 

 ties of their art to an injudicious temperament. 



The ancient Greek?, among whom this delightful art was long in the 

 hands of poets, and of mathematicians, who had much lefs to do with 

 it, afcribe almoft all its magick to the divcrfity of their Modes, but have 

 left us little more than the names of them^ without fuch ' difcriminations, as 

 might have enabled us to compare them with our own and apply them to 

 practice : their writers addreffed themfelves to Greeks, who could- not but 

 know their national mufick; and moft of thofe writers were profeffed men 

 of fcience, who thought more of calculating ratios- than of inventing melody $ 

 fo :hat, whenever we fpeak of the foft Eolian mode, of the tender -Lydian, the 

 voluptuous lonlcky the manly Dorian , or the animating' Bkrygian, we ufe 

 mere phrafes, I believe, without clear ideas. For all that is known concern- 

 ing the mufick of Greece; let me refer thofe, who have no inclination to 

 read the dry works -of the Greeks ihemfelves,to a litt T e tract of the learned 

 Wallis, which he printed as an appendix to the Harmonicks of Ptole- 

 my; to the Dictionary of Mufick by Ro jsseau, whofe pen, formed to 

 elucidate all -the arts, had the property of fprcading light before it on the 

 darkcfl fubjects, as if lie had written with phofphorus on the fides of a ca- 



