Babylon and Nineveh have left a few slabs with pictures of musicians—that is all. In Egypt we come into the possession of a knowledge considerably wider in range than other ancient lands together have yielded. Through the sacrilege of Time we have been admitted to Tombs and Temples, have shared the prerogative of the gods, seeing the hidden things and life-stories meant for their gaze only, in the darkness that to them was light. A marvellous faith. Those harps were supposed to play though no hand touched them, those pipes to pipe sweet tones that lost themselves in the silence. Egypt bred men of great genius in the art of war, of great genius in the art of architecture, surely she must have had men great in the art of music. How were these musicians ruled? The beneficent conductor had not then been invented. In truth _one_ would have been of little avail in their grand festival processions, would have been lost amidst the lofty columns of their vast temples. Not a hieroglyph anywhere to tell us how the master musician controlled his hosts “of harpers harping with their harps.” These old-world pictures speak no words; they shew us six or eight men following in a line, clapping their hands to regulate the accents and rhythm of the musicians; thus they were led, and that is all we know—may be indeed all that we are likely to know. Thus as Keats tells us, the past— ————“doth tease us out of thought, As doth eternity.” CHAPTER XXV. The Choice of the Greeks. THE DELPHIC LYRE. The fingers of the hand upon the pipes having decreed in a practical way the first scale of musical sounds, very naturally it would come to pass that an instrument with strings, in the time of beginnings, would be set to copy the same order of sounds, which, simple as it was, had an importance that held the character of law, something to be abided by. Imitation is the beginning of conservatism, all history tells us that the crudest and the most limited attainments are those that set up the sternest barriers against innovation. When the string time came, the method resorted to for obtaining differences in sounds from strings was that of varying the lengths; next the differences gained by varying the strain upon them were perceived; and ultimately the advantages from the use of strings manufactured of various thicknesses. This last method implies the cultivation of a trade or an industrial production of sheepgut treated for the purpose of the musical use of it. Probably the advance from the first step to the last was a slow process; it was progress, and progress is slow.