To tell you the truth, I send you this letter on purpose to undeceive you; I know that the upper world has a notion, that these infernal shades are destitute of all harmony, and delight in nothing but jarring, discord, and confusion; upon the word of a musician, you are all mistaken, for I never came into a merrier country, since I knew a whimsy from a fiddle-stick; every body here sings as naturally as a nightingale, and at least as sweet. Lovers sit perch’d upon bows by pairs, like murmuring turtles in a rural grove, and in amorous ditties sing forth their passionate affections; all people on this side the adamantine gates have their organs perfect, and _I burn, I burn, I burn_, which some persons thought a critical song upon earth, is here sung by every scoundrel: the whole infernal territory is infested with such innumerable crowds of poets and musicians, that a man can’t stir twice his length, but he shall tread upon a new ballad; and as for musick, ’tis so plenty amongst us, that a fellow shall be scraping upon a fiddle at every garret-window, and another tinkling a spinet, or a virginal, in every chimney-corner; flutes, hautboys and trumpets are so perpetually tooting, that all the year round the whole dominion is like a _Bartholomew-Fair_; and as for drums, you have a set of them under every devil’s window, rattling and thumping like a consort of his majesty’s rat-tat-too’s at an _English_ wedding: we have such a glut of all sorts of performers, that our very ears are surfeited; and any body may hire a consort for a day, large enough to surround _Westminster-Abbey_, for the price of an hundred of chesnuts; yet every minstrel performs to admiration. Every cobler here that dispatches a voluntary whilst he’s waxing his thread, shall out-sing Mr. _Abel_, and a carpenter shall make better musick upon an empty cupboard strung with five brass-wires, than _Baptist_ can upon the harpsichord; every trumpet that attends a botkin lottery, sounds better than _Shore_; and not a porter here plies at the corner of a street, but with his stubbed fingers, can make a smooth table out grunt the harmony of a double curtel. We have catches too in admirable perfection: Fish-women sit and sing them at market, instead of scolding as they do at _Billingsgate_; hymns and anthems are as frequent among us as among you of the upper world; for to every church God Almighty has on earth, here the devil has a chapel.