n the musical modes of the Hindus.

"After food, when the operations of digestion and absorption give so
much employment to the vessels, that a temporary state of mental repose
must be found, especially in hot climates, essential to health, it seems
reasonable to believe that a few agreeable airs, either heard or played
without effort, must have all the good effects of sleep, and none of its
disadvantages; _putting the soul in tune_, as Milton says, for any
subsequent exertion; an experiment often successfully made by myself. I
have been assured by a credible eye-witness, that two wild antelopes
used often to come from their woods to the place where a more savage
beast, Sirajuddaulah, entertained himself with concerts, and that they
listened to the strains with an appearance of pleasure, till the
monster, in whose soul there was no music, shot one of them to display
his archery. A learned native told me that he had frequently seen the
most venomous and malignant snakes leave their holes upon hearing tunes
on a flute, which, as he supposed, gave them peculiar delight. An
intelligent Persian declared he had more than once been present, when a
celebrated lutenist, surnamed Bulbul (i.e., the nightingale), was
playing to a large company, in a grove near Shiraz, where he distinctly
saw the nightingales trying to vie with the musician, sometimes warbling
on the trees, sometimes fluttering from branch to branch, as if they
wished to approach the instrument, and at length dropping on the ground
in a kind of ecstacy, from which they were soon raised, he assured me,
by a change in the mode."

Jackson of Exeter, in reply to a question of Dryden, "What passion
cannot music raise or quell?" sarcastically returns, "What passion _can_
music raise or quell?" Would not a savage, who had never listened to a
musical instrument, feel certain emotions at listening to one for the
first time? But civilized man is, no doubt, particularly affected by
_association of ideas_, as all pieces of national music evidently prove.

THE RANZ DES VACHES, mentioned by Rousseau in his Dictionary of Music,
though without anything striking in the composition, has such a powerful
influence over the Swiss, and impresses them with so violent a desire to
return to their own country, that it is forbidden to be played in the
Swiss regiments, in the French service, on pain of death. There is also
a Scotch tune, which has the same effect on some of our North Britons.