military character; those of the virgins were in measured steps, with feminine gestures; and the whole was solemn and grave for the participation of age.
It is impossible here to go into the history of Dorian music and dancing; but its early purity, as well as its subsequent corruption, its action upon the ceremonies of other worships than that of Apollo, and the re-action of other worships upon it,—all testify to the wisdom of the Dorians in making the music and dance an affair of legislation.
The power of music and the dance is exemplified especially in the fact, that with the Dorians they entered even into war, and elevated the exercise of destructiveness into an elegant art. It may be thought that this has been of no advantage to humanity, in the long run (a point of which we may not judge, perhaps, as the end is not yet); but there can be no doubt that, if war does exist, the subjection of it to the Dorian measure of music and motion has robbed it, as Burke would say, of half its ferociousness, by taking away all its brutality.
Song was the accompanying, or immediately consequent, step to the mimetic and allegoric dance; and perhaps here we may discover the origin of the multitude of measures in Greek poetry. Lyric poetry prevailed over every other among the Dorians, and was cultivated by both sexes. It originated with the Dorians, as epic poetry has originated in almost all the other tribes, and is to be referred to the predominance of religion. The ode is the natural address of the cultivated mind to the god whose very nature is proportion, and whose own sound is music. The later history of the drama is well known. The earlier history of comedy, as well as tragedy, leads us immediately to the Dorians, whose intellectual sharpness and power originated humorous expression, if not wit itself, to a remarkable degree. Humor is impossible with the intellectually effeminate. Bucolics were the accompaniment of rustic dances, and elegies of those dances which celebrated astronomical changes; and this opens out a new vista of thought as to the derivation of the very idea of dancing from the motions of the heavenly bodies. The poems of Homer were recited at first by Ionian rhapsodists; but Terpander the Dorian is said to have first set them to a regular
