As regards existing specimens, we are just as miserably provided as we are in the case of painting. We have recovered a few scraps of the musical notation accompanying poetical words; and as we understand this notation, it is an easy task to reproduce the so-called melody. We have also a scrap or two in the notation of instrumental music (apparently an accompaniment), a notation, strange to say, differing from the oral. But here the melody is missing. And let me tell you at once that no living musician could attempt to supply it with the smallest verisimilitude. The same is the case with our texts of melody. There was a much lauded hymn found a few years ago on the wall of one of the houses uncovered at Delphi. In some places the surface of the stone was broken; so that there were gaps here and there of a bar or two in the music. No living musician who knows his business would undertake to supply any one of these gaps.[30] Were it a modern composition, we could with certainty offer two or three alternatives, and we could exclude a vast number of restorations as absolutely impossible. Such is not the case with the Greek specimens we know, neither do they appeal to our modern taste. To say that these specimens, when played for us, are hideous, is merely the expression of that violated taste. There are many, perhaps even some in this audience, who would say the same thing of the plain song which the present Pope has ordered to be used in Roman Catholic churches to the exclusion of more modern music. The real conclusion is that so far Greek music is to us unintelligible; and yet in all the other arts nothing is more intelligible to modern minds than the products of Greek taste which are our best and clearest models. Is it that a highly artistic nation may be wanting in one particular department? We have before us the case of the modern Japanese, whose artistic work in most directions is of great excellence and fully appreciated by the world, but who confess (at least I have heard one most intelligent native confess) that their music is far below the level of European compositions. But here we probably start from a difference of scale, whereas the Greek scales (or at least the diatonic) are the parents of all modern European scales.