until driven out by better ones. It
still survives in Scotland. Its influence is distinctly to be traced
in the Scotch melodies founded upon the pentatonic scale, of which the
following is a specimen:

[Music illustration: SCOTCH MELODY (IN THE PENTATONIC SCALE).

The law-land lads think they are fine:
But O they're vain and wondrou' gawdy!
How much unlike that grace-fu' mien,
And man-ly looks of no High-land Lad-die!
O my bon-ny, ben-ny High-land Lad-die,
O my hand-some High-land lad-die!
when I was sick, and like to die,
he row'd me in his high-land plai-die.]

CHAPTER VII.

THE ARABS OR SARACENS.

Upon many accounts the influence of the Arab civilization was
important in this quarter of the musical world, and it may here well
enough engage our attention, since its most important aspects are
those in which it operates upon the European mind, awakening there
ideas which but for this stimulus might have remained dormant
centuries longer.

From the standpoint of the western world and the limited information
concerning the followers of Mahomet which enters into our educational
curricula, the Arab appears to us an inert figure, picturesque and
imposing, upon the sandy carpet of northern Africa, but a force of
little influence in the world of modern nineteenth-century thought.

Nevertheless, there was a time when this picturesque figure became
seized with an activity which shook Europe and Christendom to its very
center. The voice of the prophet Mahomet awakened the Arab from his
slumber. He aroused himself to the duty of proselyting the world to
the doctrine of the One God and the Great Prophet. With sword in hand
and the rallying cry of his faith he went forth, with such result that
a vast proportion of the inhabitants of the globe at this very hour
profess the tenets of his religion. Once awakened into life, he
penetrated the distant east, and brought back thence the foundation of
our arithmetic, the predecessor of our greatest of musical
instruments, the violin, and discovered for himself the productions of
the greatest of the Greek minds, the works of the philosopher
Aristotle. He established a new state in Spain, and for several
centuries confronted Christendom with the alternative of the sword or
his faith. One of the best characterizations of this people upon the
musical-literary side is that of the eminent M. Ginguene, who in his
"History of Italian Litera