But the Greeks had frowned upon this barbaric
foreign noise. They liked to hear a man recite the stately poetry of
Homer and Pindar. They allowed him to accompany himself upon the lyre
(the poorest of all stringed instruments). That was as far as any one
could go without incurring the risk of popular disapproval. The Romans
on the other hand had loved orchestral music at their dinners and
parties and they had invented most of the instruments which (in VERY
modified form) we use to-day. The early church had despised this music
which smacked too much of the wicked pagan world which had just been
destroyed. A few songs rendered by the entire congregation were all
the bishops of the third and fourth centuries would tolerate. As the
congregation was apt to sing dreadfully out of key without the guidance
of an instrument, the church had afterwards allowed the use of an organ,
an invention of the second century of our era which consisted of a
combination of the old pipes of Pan and a pair of bellows.

Then came the great migrations. The last of the Roman musicians were
either killed or became tramp-fiddlers going from city to city and
playing in the street, and begging for pennies like the harpist on a
modern ferry-boat.

But the revival of a more worldly civilisation in the cities of the late
Middle Ages had created a new demand for musicians. Instruments like
the horn, which had been used only as signal-instruments for hunting and
fighting, were remodelled until they could reproduce sounds which were
agreeable in the dance-hall and in the banqueting room. A bow strung
with horse-hair was used to play the old-fashioned guitar and before the
end of the Middle Ages this six-stringed instrument (the most ancient of
all string-instruments which dates back to Egypt and Assyria) had grown
into our modern four-stringed fiddle which Stradivarius and the other
Italian violin-makers of the eighteenth century brought to the height of
perfection.

And finally the modern piano was invented, the most wide-spread of all
musical instruments, which has followed man into the wilderness of the
jungle and the ice-fields of Greenland. The organ had been the first
of all keyed instruments but the performer always depended upon the
co-operation of some one who worked the bellows, a job which nowadays
is done by electricity. The musicians therefore looked for a handier and
less circumstantial instrument to assist them in training the pupils
of th