ted.

Country squires, when kept indoors by stress of bad weather, will
experience much relief in a hunting-song, while young gentlemen of the
town will perhaps prefer an old English derry-down. Hospital inmates
will usually be content with hurdy-gurdies, and the poorer classes may
be supplied with ballads at their own homes. Some patients will recover
with all the rapidity of a jig, while others will mend in minuet-time.
And surely the public welfare will be eminently promoted, when our
physicians' prescriptions are printed from music-type, and when we have
nothing more nauseous to swallow than the words of a modern
opera.[192:1]

According to the Dutch physician Lemnius (1505-1568), music is a chief
antidote against melancholy; it revives the languishing soul, affecting
not only the ears, but the vital and animal spirits. It erects the mind,
and makes it nimble.

The Reverend Sydney Smith graphically described the effect of enlivening
music upon an audience, who had been manifestly bored and were gaping
with ennui during the execution of an elaborate fugue, by a skilled
orchestra. Suddenly there sprang up a lively little air, expressive of
some natural feeling. And instantly every one beamed with satisfaction,
and was ready to aver that music affords the most delightful and
rational entertainment.

And such is doubtless the opinion of the great majority of people of
culture and refinement, especially those of a jovial or mercurial
temperament. According to Martin Luther, the Devil is a saturnine
person, and music is hateful to him.

Many and sundry are the means, says Robert Burton, which philosophers
and physicians have prescribed to exhilarate a sorrowful heart, to
divert those fixed and intent cares and meditations, which in this
malady so much offend; but in my judgment, none so present, none so
powerful, none so apposite as mirth, music and merry company.[193:1]

During recent years the influence of music in disease has been the
subject of renewed attention. In London Canon Harford, an enthusiastic
believer in the efficacy of this method of treatment, organized bands of
musicians, under the auspices of the Order of Saint Cecilia, who visited
certain hospitals, where permission had been given, and there exercised
their art with results highly encouraging and beneficial.

And in Boston Dr. John Dixwell has for many years been active in
providing music for hospital patients. His admirable enterprise has been