X. What good-disposed ears can, in sacred chants, endure those enormous breaks, and lascivious inflections, which offend against the rules of decency, and are contrary to those of music? I speak of those flights and wanderings, which seem as if they had been studied, and which the voice takes by straying from the subject of the melody; of those languishing falls from one point to another, that run not only through the semi-tone, but also through all the intermediate comas, and are transitions, which are not contained in art, nor does Nature allow them. XI. Experience shews, that the changes which the voice makes in the chant, by running through small intervals (such passages containing in themselves a degree of effeminate softness, if not a lascivious tendency), are apt to produce in the minds of hearers, an effect, correspondent to such sort of ideas, and impress on the fancy certain confused images, which represent nothing good. On this account, many of the antients, and particularly the Lacedæmonians, reprobated as pernicious to youth, the sort of music called Chromatic, which by the introduction of B-flatts, and sostenutos, divides the octave into smaller intervals than the natural ones. Hear what Cicero says of this: _Chromaticum creditur repudiatum pridem fuisse genus, quod adolescentum remolesccrent eo genere animi; Lacedæmones improbasse ferentur. (Lib. 1. Tuscul. Quæst.)_ It may be supposed, they would have found more reason for prohibiting the Enharmonic also; which, by the addition of more flats and sostenutos, and by being joined to the two other sorts, the Diatonic and Chromatic, which must necessarily precede it, and by making the interval less still, divides the octave into a greater number of points: in consequence of which combination (the voice, by sometimes deviating from the natural point, through spaces which are yet shorter, that is to say, the minor semi-tones) there results a music, more soft and effeminate than the Chromatic.