XXXVI. Those err by exceeding or doing too much, who regulate their music with a puerile nicety, to correspond with the distinct or separate signification of each word, taken or standing by itself, without having regard to the meaning of the whole context. An example produced by father Kircher to illustrate this abuse, will explain what I mean. He instanced the manner, in which a composer had set to music the following verse: _Mors festinat luctuosa_; to the words _mors_ and _luctuosa_, he applied a mournful solfa; but to the word _festinat_, which stood in the middle between them, as it seemed to him, to signify vivacity or quickness, he appropriated a career of allegros, that would have caused the most sluggish nag who heard them, to bound about and give cabriols. XXXVII. I saw something as bad, or indeed even worse than this, in one of the lamentations I cited before; where to the music adapted to express the following sentence: _Deposita est vehementer non habens consolatorem_, was marked ayroso. How ill-suited is an airy movement, to express the lamentable fall of Jerusalem, and also that of all mankind bowed down and crippled with the weight of their sins; which misfortune, was aggravated with the additional and distressing circumstance, of their being destitute of comfort under the calamity? But the blame of all this, was imputable to the adverb _vehementer_, because to express vehemence, appeared to the composer to require a lively movement; and thus, when he came to that word in the sentence, he quickened his pace, and upon the adverb _vehementer_, expended in rapid notes, music to the amount of forty crotchets; but the word, in the sense it was there used, was intended to signify the same as _gravissime_, and to express with energy, the degree of grief and sadness, occasioned by the fall of Jerusalem, which, crippled and bore down with the crushing weight of its sins, came to the ground, temple, walls, and houses, all together. XXXVIII. Nobody was more guilty of this fault, than the celebrated Duron, and he committed it to such a degree, that sometimes in the same couplet, just as the signification of the words of the verse varied, taken separately or by themselves, he would vary the affectations of the chant, six or eight times; and although it required great address and ability to do this, which he in reality was possessed of; such an exertion of his talents was ill applied. SECT. X.