incipal characteristics from the language. Now if there is a language
in Europe fit for music, it is certainly the Italian, for it is sweet,
sonorous, harmonious, and more accentuated than any other, and these are
precisely the four qualities which adapt a language to singing. It is
sweet because the articulations are not composite, because the meeting
of consonants is both infrequent and soft, and because a great number of
the syllables being only formed of vowels, frequent elisions make its
pronunciation more flowing. It is sonorous because most of the vowels
are full, because it is without composite diphthongs, because it has
few or no nasal vowels. Again, the inversions of the Italian are far
more favourable to true melody than the didactic order of French. And so
onwards, with much close grappling of the matter. French melody does not
exist; it is only a sort of modulated plain-song which has nothing
agreeable in itself, which only pleases with the aid of a few capricious
ornaments, and then only pleases those who have agreed to find it
beautiful.[320]

The letter contains a variety of acute remarks upon music, and includes
a vigorous protest against fugues, imitations, double designs, and the
like. Scarcely any one succeeds in them, and success even when obtained
hardly rewards the labour. As for counterfugues, double fugues, and
"other difficult fooleries that the ear cannot endure nor the reason
justify," they are evidently relics of barbarism and bad taste which
only remain, like the porticoes of our gothic churches, to the disgrace
of those who had patience enough to construct them.[321] The last
phrase-and both Voltaire and Turgot used gothic architecture as the
symbol for the supreme of rudeness and barbarism--shows that even a man
who seems to run counter to the whole current of his time yet does not
escape its influence.

Grimm, after remarking on the singularity of a demonstration of the
impossibility of setting melody to French words on the part of a writer
who had just produced the Village Soothsayer, informs us that the letter
created a furious uproar, and set all Paris in a blaze. He had himself
taken the side of the Italians in an amusing piece of pleasantry, which
became a sort of classic model for similar facetiousness in other
controversies of the century. The French, as he said, forgive everything
in favour of what makes them laugh, but Rousseau talked reason and
demolished the pretensions of Fr