64 
SCENES IN INDIA. 
there generally prevails a keen relish for, and a ready 
aptitude in, producing an artificial combination of 
sounds, constituting a melody in which they delight, 
however rude and repulsive to more fastidious ears, 
which the refinements of extreme cultivation have 
rendered difficult to please ,* so that music is a univer- 
sal, and, to a certain extent, may be denominated an 
intuitive science. That it was cultivated in the 
first ages of society may be proved from Moses, who 
records that before the flood, Jubal, the seventh in 
descent from Adam, by his eldest son Cain, “ was 
the father of all such as handle the harp or organ f 
here distinctly averring that the harp and organ were 
instruments known in the very earliest ages of the 
world. By some commentators, however, those ex- 
pressions are considered to be mere generic terms, the 
former applying to all the stringed, and the latter to 
all the wind instruments then employed. 
In considering the musical qualifications of different 
countries, we are to remember that our perceptions 
of the harmonious, as well as of the beautiful, depend 
altogether upon circumstances : our minds are mould- 
ed and our tastes nurtured by those circumstances. 
The man who had never beheld the sun but from a 
lofty eminence, or from valleys surrounded by gigantic 
shapes, where vast crags tremble above his head, 
precipices yawn beneath his feet, and the perpetual 
dash of the mountain-torrent chimes in his ear the 
clamorous music of his native hills, — such a man, 
surely, would entertain very different feelings of the 
sublime and beautiful, as well of what was addressed 
to the ear as to the eye, from him who had passed his 
