HINDOO MUSIC. 
59 
tion, but showing sufficient skill in the design, songs 
the most disgustingly licentious, sung by the vilest 
characters. The best artists in Hindostan are to be 
found among the rich and learned, who often study 
music as a science, and occasionally attain consider- 
able proficiency in it. Indeed, in some instances, 
they have manifested a knowledge of foreign music 
which might shame many of our own professors. 
The antiquity of Hindoo song is attested by 
existing records; and when the war-songs of the 
Germans, in the time of Tacitus, were pealed from 
hill to hill, like the cry of the Scottish gathering, 
or echoed through the dark tracts of their primeval 
forests, over which perhaps the waters of the univer- 
sal deluge had poured their devastation, the vina * 
of the Hindoos was heard amid the palm-groves of 
the East, tuned to scientific measures, and sharing 
with the Eastern nightingale the admiration of 
man. 
There is a very ancient treatise on Indian music, 
by Soma, who was a “ practical musician as well as 
a great scholar and elegant poet ; for the whole book, 
without excepting the strains noted in letters which 
fill the fifth and last chapters of it, consists of master- 
ly couplets in the melodious metre called A’rya, The 
first, third, and fourth chapters explain the doctrine 
of musical sounds, their division and succession, the 
variations of scales by temperament, and the enu- 
meration of modes, on a system totally different from 
those which will presently be mentioned ; and the 
* The Hindoo lute. 
