Looking to the East as to the cradle of civilisation, we naturally accept every relic and record coming thence as of the very highest importance. The national music of no other countries has been so carefully studied by competent and erudite writers as this; and, if it be considered in the antiquarian and scientific point of view, the able work of Herr Engel may be said in some measure to have exhausted the subject.

Viewed, however, on its picturesque side, a remark is to be offered to which, it seems to me, attention has not been sufficiently drawn. Instrumental resource was developed earlier, and with greater certainty, than any cultivation of the voice such as comes home to modern sympathies. However conventional they be, the pictures of harp and lyre (the latter the descendant of the old fabled tortoise-shell, cast on the strand, and strung with a sinew or two)–otherwise of the instruments which are played (the French expressively say, pinched) by the fingers, or are caressed by the plectrum or bow–those of pipes of every quality, whether they be blown by the mouth, or the wind within them set in motion by the elbow–painted on the walls of the temples and tombs of Egypt during the times when the one were reared behind their avenues of sphinxes, and the others locked up in the heart of some mountainous pyramid– have a meaning not to be misread. They indicate a state of constancy in their fabrication ; as, too, in the ornamental luxury applied to their garniture.