To these ravishing sounds, as harmonious as sweet, we may very deservedly join those of the orchestra. Conceive to yourself a continual clashing of jarring instruments, attended with the drawling and perpetual groans of the base, a noise the most doleful and insupportable that I ever heard in my life, and which I could never bear a quarter of an hour together without being seized with a violent head-ach. All this forms a species of psalmody, which has commonly neither time nor tune. But when, by accident they hit on an air a little lively, the feet of the audience are immediately in motion, and the whole house thunders with their clattering. The pit in particular, with much pains and a great noise, always imitate a certain performer in the orchestra. [36] Delighted to perceive for a moment that cadence which they so seldom feel, they strain their ears, voice, hands, feet, and in short, their whole body to keep that time, which is every moment ready to escape them. Instead of this the Italians and Germans, who are more easily affected with the measures of their music, pursue them without any effort, and have never any occasion to beat time. At least, Regianino has often told me, that, at the opera in Italy, where the music is so affecting and lively, you will never see, or hear, in the orchestra or among the spectators, the least motion of either hands or feet. But in this country, every thing serves to prove the dullness of their musical organs; their voices are harsh and unpleasing, their tones affected and drawling, and their transitions hard and dissonant: there is no cadence nor melody in their songs; their martial instruments, the fifes of the infantry, the trumpets of their cavalry, their horns, their hautboys, the ballad-singers in the streets, and the fiddlers in their public-houses, all have something so horribly grating as to shock the most indelicate ear. [37] All talents are not bestowed on the same men, and the French in general are of all the people in Europe those of the least aptitude for music. Lord B---- pretends that the English have as little, but the difference is, that they know it, and care nothing about the matter, whereas the French give up a thousand just pretensions, and will submit to be censured in any other point whatever, sooner than admit they are not the first musicians in the world. There are even people at Paris who look upon the cultivation of music as the concern of the state, perhaps because the improvement of Timotheus’s lyre was so at Sparta. However this be, the opera here may, for aught I know, be a good political institution, in that it pleases persons of taste no better. But to return to my description. The _ballets_, which are the most brilliant parts of the opera, considered of themselves, afford a pleasing entertainment, as they are magnificent and truly theatrical; but, as they enter into the composition of the piece, it is in that light we must consider them.