58 
SCENES IN INDIA. 
the “ Asiatic Researches/’ on the musical modes of 
the Hindoos, by Sir William Jones. 
“ I have often been assured,” he says, by a 
credible eye-witness, that two wild antelopes used 
often to come from their woods to the place where 
a more savage beast, Sira Juddowlah, entertained 
himself with concerts ; and that they listened to 
the strains with an appearance of pleasure, till the 
monster in whose soul there was no music, shot one 
of them to display his archery. Secondly, a learned 
native of this country told me that he had frequently 
seen the most venomous and most malignant snakes 
leave their holes upon hearing tunes on a flute, which, 
as he supposed, gave them peculiar delight. And, 
thirdly, an intelligent Persian, who repeated his story 
again and again, and permitted me to write it down 
from his own lips, declared that he had more than 
once been present when a celebrated lutanist, Mirza 
Mohammed, surnamed Bulbul, was playing to a large 
company, in a grove near Shiraz, when he distinctly 
saw the nightingales trying to vie with the musician, 
sometimes warbling on the trees, sometimes flutter- 
ing from branch to branch, as if they wished to ap- 
proach the instrument whence the melody proceeded ; 
and at length dropping on the ground in a kind of 
ecstacy, from which they were soon raised, he assured 
me, by a change of the mode.” 
We should do the Indians a gross injustice if we 
imagined their music was only cultivated by the 
commoner order, who follow the rabble to a festival, 
cavalcade, or religious procession, and frequently ac- 
company upon their instruments, rude in the execu- 
