Among the ancient musical theorists, whose respective merits are discussed and extolled, are the profound Pythagoras; the practical as well as speculative Lasus; the mathematical Aristoxenus; the erudite Euclid; Didymus, distinguished by his introduction of the minor tone; the searching though visionary Ptolemeus, and Gerasenus; Plutarch, the deserving favourite of his imperial patron Trajan; the eccentric Quintilian; the recondite Censorinus; and the musician, scholar, and philosopher, Porphyry. If the discussion of the various attributes of these speculative writers is not so complete as some readers might wish, it may at least be considered as faithful in its matter, and methodical in its arrangement. Perhaps, however, it would scarcely be fair to expect in a work, the rays of which are necessarily directed more to one particular point than to any other, that an extraordinary light should be thrown on objects no otherwise connected with the principal subject, than as they resided in the same persons. The history before us addresses itself, and properly addresses itself, to the attention of the musical inquirer; and we are not prepared to say that any thing would have been gained, either to the honour of the author, or the advantage of the public, had he more largely mingled with his professed topic, disquisitions touching various and remote sciences.

In conformity with the introductory idea conveyed in his first chapter, our historian commences his tenth, with insisting upon the extreme antiquity of music, both instrumental and vocal; and, upon the assumption that its exercise began with the earliest operations of nature, he founds the opinion, that the employment of its sounds as significative or intelligent signs, was antecedent to the invention of written representations of thought and feeling. His language is,

"The expression of the passions, by vocal and appreciable sounds, is so natural, that we cannot but imagine its origin to have been coeval with that of the human race. The complaints of pain, and the exclamations of joy, required no other guide or tutor than the sentiment to be developed; and nature, faithful to herself, spoke in tones inspired and modulated by her feelings. The observation applies even to language. Though in writing a word is ever the same, in delivery it is susceptible of a thousand different shadings, accommodated to the sense and the sensations meant to be conveyed or excited. All those shadings or variations it is Music's very office to furnish. The heart gives her the clue, but the voice is her own providing; the grief and the pleasure, the hatred and the affection, exist without her; but, without her, want their most forcible expression. Shall we then wonder, if hymns and songs preceded the use of letters, and for a long time even supplied the place of history? Laws were origi. nally sung, and prayers were chanted. To religion and justice, Music supplied zeal and solemnity; to the social enjoyments of life, added an amiable embellishment, and a more exalted hilarity." Vol. i. p. 205.

These ideas, so far as they regard religion, are sanctioned by our knowledge of the early use of the Theurgic hymns; and of the succeeding introduction of the poeans and dithyrambics, as also of the philosophic or allegorical strains, which were but improvements upon the vociferations of the agriculturist and the shepherd. Music, extending its province and its influence from the field to the city, assumed new grace; after displaying its powers in the rude emanations of rural grief or felicity, it poured itself forth in the more regular and polished form of moral and mythological, patriotic and convivial songs, call

ed by the Greeks Scolia; and these again, branched into the rehear sals of sorrow and joy, whether national or private. Defeats and de mises were deplored, and victories and marriages celebrated, in song; and even the festive seasons or holidays, of the different arts or voca tions, were enlivened with their own peculiar effusions. The shepherds had their Bucoliasm; the reapers their Lytierse; the millers their Hymee; the weavers their Eliné; the wool-carders their Yulé; the nurses their Nunnia; lovers their Nomion; ladies their Calycé; and young girls their Harpalycé: besides which, the genius of marriage chanted his Hymenea; joy his Datis; grief her Jalema; and death his Linos.

After regretting the vacuum occasioned in this department of mu◄ sical history, by the total loss of the ancient defletory and festive melodies, Dr. Busby proceeds to notice the pneumatic, fidicinal, and pulsatile instruments of the Greeks Among these he enumerates the aulos, or flute; cheras, or horn; salpinx, or syrinx; tuba, or trumpet; and hydraulicon, or water-organ; the chelys, or lyre; and the psalterion, or psalter; the tympanum, or drum; cymbalon, or cymbal; and the crotalum and bells. Through the numerous particulars discussed and explained in this part of his subject, we cannot find room to follow our historian, whose modesty, scarcely just to his learning and labour, laments that he has been unable to give but a scanty view of the practical ancient music. It is true, as he himself observes, that "time, and the darkness that has intervened between antiquity and ourselves, have left but limited sources of information, and still fewer on which we can depend;" but, without intending any unmerited compliment, we must admit that Dr. Busby's industry and ingenuity have made the most of his circumscribed materials, and supplied their deficiency by conjectures too rational not to sanction their admission, and which confer honour on his patience and pene tration.

Respecting the music of the ancient Romans, the work under our eye does not convey so humble an idea as that expressed by Hawkins and Burney." Though the vocal strains of the Romans," says our author, "were not comparable with those of the Greeks, as imitations of such originals, they must have been far from contemptible; and from their constant and various use among the Romans, are indeed too important, not to claim formal notice in a work professing to give an account of the ancient music,-not to stimulate inquiry among the best and most authentic of their historians." He then, in support of his opinion, cites Dionysius, Livy, Horace, Suetonius, Vitruvius, and other writers; and fortifies his arguments by a variety of facts, among which those related by Apuleius (Metam. lib. ii.) are curious, and offer evidence decisive of the cultivation of music among the Romans, and the high interest it had with that people. It is admitted, that the barbarous custom among them, of abandoning to their slaves the practice of the liberal accomplishments, must have operat ed as a great impediment to their progress generally; but Dr. Busby thinks it no slight proof of the esteem in which the harmonic art was held by the most exalted ranks in Rome, that the emperors Nero and Commodus were ambitious of publicly distinguishing themselves as vocal and instrumental performers.

Against the assertion of the Abbé Gedoyn, that the Greeks were to the Romans what nature was to the Greeks, our historian successfully contends. The passage is worthy of being presented to our readers.

"More correct had it been to say, that what the Egyptians were to the Greeks, the Greeks were to the Romans. Egypt was the great fount from which Greece drew her learning, her science, and her arts. And from no science did she make more copious draughts than from that of music. For this accomplishment, the Romans were indebted to Etruria and Sicily, a considerable while before they were instructed by the Greeks, whatever were the improvements they afterwards derived from their conquest of, and subsequent intimacy with, that refined people. It is, therefore, equally incorrect to say, that the Romans had no examples but in the Greeks, and that the Greeks were without models, save those presented to them by nature; especially as regarding music, in the theory and practice of which they, in a great degree, were instructed by the Egyptians, as the Romans afterwards were by the Etrurians and Sicilians." Vol. i. p. 239.

So correct is our author, in denying that the Greeks were purely indebted to nature, and not to the Egyptians, for their music and other sciences, that he might, and indeed ought, to have gone farther and shewn, that the Egyptians themselves were not wholly indebted to nature, but to the knowledge and wisdom of the East, for the noblest and most refined of their acquisitions both in science and art. It is not more true, that though for centuries, the Romans, who were more renowned as a military than as a polite and learned people, at length became the admirers and imitators of Grecian knowledge and Grecian elegance, than that if the Romans were but the reflectors of their Hellenic instructors, these again were only the mirrors of the Egyptian sages, as the latter were of the eastern lights. The rays of those original luminaries falling upon Egyptian intellect were thrown by it upon Grecian genius, and thence cast upon the mental soil of Rome. The sublime talents which they illumined have long since vanished; but the glory of her energetic mind still beams in its nobler monuments. Her orators, her poets, her phi. losophers, and her historians still survive, the immortal vouchers of abilities, which, comparatively late as they shone, only required examples and cultivation, to become adequate to the attainment of any excellence. Those examples, and that cultivation, at length arrived, and far from enlightening the Romans upon every subject but one, rendered them musicians as well as poets and philosophers; and, to borrow the language of our author, "if Homer and Menander had their Roman emulators, so had Terpander and Telephanes."

In treating of the music of the early Christians, Dr. Busby takes a considerable latitude, without, however, pretending to ascertain, whether music has been more indebted to religion, or religion to music. We rgret with him, that no specimens of the melodies first used by the Christian world, remain to inform us of its style and character. Whether the strains of the theatre were ecclesiastical, or those of the church theatrical, we have no authentic means of determining; but from the fact, that the passion of Christ was dramatized by the early priests, and the reasonable conjecture, that the Christian chants were partly borrowed from the music used in the Hebrew worship, and partly from that adopted in the Pagan temples, we should incline to

the opinion, that, for a long time, the church was the general parent of Christian melody; and that the drama was indebted to clerical taste, such as it might be, for its harmonical embellishments. We thus express ourselves, because, however they might affect the ear of St. Augustine, St. Ignatius, and St. Ambrose, our idea of the strains in which the primitive Christians wafted their vows to heaven is not, we confess, very exalted. The cramped and imperfect scales on which the ecclesiastical chants were founded-the paucity of notes employed, and the total absence of modulation, must have necessitated a dry, monotonous, and barren series of unharmonized sounds; so that even the dances which for some centuries constituted a part of the Christian worship, were heavily accompanied by the Canto Fermo; and agility resigned its natural animation to the sombre performance of sonorous dulness. Such was the church music brought hither from Italy by the monk Austin, and practised till the time of St. Dunstan; when the organ began to add to our religious service the rich ornament of its embodied harmony. This advance in the performance of sacred music, not only raised and aggrandized the choral service, (for in the church, till this noble instrument was introduced, the only accompaniment of the voice was that of the harp or psalter,) but formed a foundation for the superstructure of harmony; and the science, once properly planted among us, loved the soil and flourished rapidly.

During the pontificate of Benedict VIII., Guido appeared, with his invention of notation, his harmonic band, his hexachord, and his counterpoint. Habit and the ear, no longer the feeble and uncertain guides of the voice, yielded their empire to the unerring and permanent direction of visible signs, and harmony was enabled to assume a firmer basis. The genius of Franco, bright amid the unextinguished splendour of his predecessor, improved upon the precepts of the Micrologus, and other tracts of the Abbot of the Holy Cross, and became the author of innovations worthy of being dignified with the name of discoveries. Walter of Evesham, while he was calculating the duration of the heavenly bodies, and ascertaining the mutations of the atmosphere, improved the structure of harmony; and the genius of Marchetto da Padova, suggested the resolution of discords.

One of the most striking epochs in music, as we conceive, was that of the invention of the time-table. On the nature and value of this acquisition, so important to harmony, our author expatiates so fully and satisfactorily, that we cannot do better than quote his words.

"So necessary is a systematic division of time, to the due performance of music in which two or more parts move in consonance, that it is difficult to conceive how harmonized melodies could be sung or played, without such a regulation. Whether the notes were similar, or dissimilar in form, if no relative lengths or durations were assigned to them, and if no measure commenced and terminated the corresponding phrases of the parts, the unions would be in continual danger of becoming false, and of misrepresenting the design of the composer: however simple the counterpoint, the particular sounds in either part might, or might not be given simultaneously with the sounds in the other part, or parts, in conjunction with which they were meant to be heard. The principal provision against the dissonance that would almost conti

nually result from this deficiency, would be a previous agreement to give equal lengths to the harmonizing notes; that is, to begin and end the corresponding sounds at the same time, in the manner of a modern congregation singing in unison the equallized notes of the common parochial psalmody. Another partial resource would be in the observance of the long and short syllables of the verse; but still, the relative durations, not being precisely ascertained, but left to the loose determination of feeling, and the ge neral rules of prosody, it would often happen that the harmonizing sounds would not meet, and that a discordancy would ensue as great as if the parts of which the composition consists, had been constructed without any view to a harmonized conjunction. Hence, there is no reason whatever to doubt, that the necessity of time in florid counterpoint first suggested its adoption." Vol. I. P. 295.

Of the invention of the time-table we have no certain knowledge; but there is sufficient ground for the opinion, that to John De Muris, (by some styled a Doctor of the Sorbonne,) it owed very considerable improvement; since one of his learned and numerous works, preserved in the Vatican, is a "Treatise on Time, or Measured Music." That Philippus de Vitriaco, the first distinguished musical writer after De Muris, advanced this object of his predecessor's labours, can scarcely be doubted, when we recollect, that he was the inventor of a new character of time,-the minim. From the successive efforts and ingenuity of these masters, it would appear, that the time-table gradually derived that efficient state by which the means of regular and consentaneous performance were provided, and the cultivation of polyphonic music promoted. To their able and well directed exertions, music owed its earlier improvements in the formation of its consonance, and its assumption of that systematic order in its motion, which laid the foundation for a richer and more elaborate harmony, and could not but lead to that artificial and complicated disposition of transient and protracted sounds, which, in the hands of genius, have since imparted to the higher species of composition so much sweetness, force, and sublimity.

The next chapter of this comprehensive and luminous work canvasses the province of the minstrels and troubadours; an order of men whose productions and performances, serving to elucidate history and awaken enthusiasm and courage, recommended them to the favour and protection of princes and barons; at whose courts and castles they found their presence desirable. The language in which our historian describes the importance attached to these itinerant poet-musicians, and the power of their effusions over their fascinated auditors, is elegant and forcible. "Patriots," says he, "heard with delight the interesting events of their country's career in power and civilization; warriors listened with zeal and with pride, to the eulogies of va◄ lour and conquest; and the ears of beauty drank them with a rapture that was not always concealed, and a gratitude that was sometimes tenderly demonstrated." Yet, he tells us, that their music, like their poetry, was wild and unconnected, quaint and capricious: and it is well known, that the first real specimens of air were given by the genius of the troubadours. But there was a race of rhapsodists whose character wss more elevated in the public estimation, than that of the troubadours and minstrels. The bards were literary in a higher sense of the expression, than that in which it could be applied to their less