Pardon me! resumed De Lancaster: If leisure now served, I could give you specimens of the pains I have taken in the way of illustration, not only with the learned treatise of _Vincentio Galilei_, a noble Spaniard, published in the year 1581, but also with the Satyricon of _Martianus Capella_, as edited and illustrated by the celebrated Grotius in his early years. Permit me to say that I could give you the scale, and mark out to you the distinct semitones of _Quarlino_, _Giovanni Bardi_, and _Pierro Strozzi_. This would be demonstration, that could not fail to edify, and at the same time I would adduce such evidence, as should prove to you that my ancestorial harp was the very prototype of that, which _Epigonus_ of _Ambracia_ was said to have played upon with forty strings, when he first taught the Sicyonian minstrels to lay aside the plectrum, and employ their fingers in the place of it: when _Julius Pollux_ therefore gives this new-constructed harp the name of Epigonium in honour of Epigonus, it is a mere trick, after the custom of the Greeks, to arrogate all originality to their countrymen, and defraud my ancestor of his prior title to give name to his own invention. In like manner I can detect their plagiarism, when they ascribe the invention of the double-headed plectrum to Sappho, whilst I have models still in my possession, that prove it to have been the very identical plectrum in general use, when my ingenious ancestor struck out a better practice. I am therefore very naturally interested to prevent my ancestorial harp from being confounded with the seven-stringed lyre, ascribed by Homer to Mercury, of which the testudo formed the sounding-board; much less would I have it mistaken for that delineated by _Hyginus_ with crooked arms, and least of all with the suspicious model in the museum of the Medici. All this, my dear sir, said the colonel, I should be extremely delighted with, were I capable of understanding it; but alas! how should I, who was never accustomed to admire any thing above the crash of a regimental band, comprehend a single word of what you have been saying to me? That I am capable of preferring one tune before another is all I pretend to, but to assign any reason for that preference is what I do not pretend to.