And, indeed, from such information as we are able to gather on the subject, it would appear that the practice of music, even in its simplest forms, was practically unknown to the New England Puritans before the end of the seventeenth century, though some of the Leyden colonists, according to Winslow, were 'very expert in music.' Out of the forty-odd psalm tunes in use among the Pilgrims only five were generally known to New England congregations a generation later, and, even of these five, no congregation could ever perform one with any approach to unanimity. 'In the latter part of the seventeenth and the commencement of the eighteenth centuries,' says Hood, 'the congregations throughout New England were rarely able to sing more than three or four tunes. The knowledge and use of notes, too, had so long been neglected that the few melodies sung became corrupted until no two individuals sang them alike.' The Rev. Thomas Symmes, in an essay published in 1723, tells us that 'in our congregations we us'd frequently to have some people singing a note or two after the next had done. And you commonly strike the notes not together, but one after another, one being half-way thro' the second note, before his neighbor had done with the first. This is just as melodious to a well-tuned musical ear as Æsop was beautiful to a curious eye.' 'It's strange,' he comments further on, 'that people that are so set against stated forms of prayer should be so fond of singing half a dozen tunes, nay one tune from Sabbath to Sabbath; till everybody nauseates it, that has any relish of singing.' In fact, the reverend gentleman confesses that if anything could drive him to Quakerism or Popery it would be the style of singing in vogue among his co-religionists. John Eliot, son of the Indian apostle, in an essay published in 1725, says that 'often at lectures, and especially at ordinations, where people of many congregations met together, their ways of singing are so different that 'tis not easy to know what tune is sung, and in reality there is none. 'Tis rather jumble and confusion. Altho' they all doubtless intend some tune or other, and, it may be, the same, yet they differ almost as much as if, everyone sung a different tune.' The effect must have been delightful. Samuel Sewall, who was precentor of his church for twenty-four years, makes the following plaintive entry in his diary for February 6, 1715: 'This day I set Windsor tune, and the people at the second going over into Oxford, do what I could.' Under date of February 23, 1718, he writes: 'I set York tune, and the congregation went out of it into St. David's in the very 2nd going over. They did the same three weeks be.' Certainly the vocal efforts of the New England saints must have been excruciating when they moved the Reverend Thomas Walter to declare that the singing of his congregation 'sounded like five hundred different tunes roared out at the same time.' It is almost