es the 'Te Deum,' the 'Te Lucis Ante,' the 'Amor che
nella mente,'[177] and the 'Chant de Roland,' are mingled songs of
mourning, of Pagan origin (whether Greek or Danish), holding grasp still
of the races that have once learned them, in times of suffering and
sorrow; and songs of Christian humiliation or grief, regarding chiefly
the sufferings of Christ, or the conditions of our own sin: while
through the entire system of these musical complaints are interwoven
moralities, instructions, and related histories, in illustration of
both, passing into Epic and Romantic verse, which gradually, as the
forms and learnings of society increase, becomes less joyful, and more
didactic, or satiric, until the last echoes of Christian joy and melody
vanish in the 'Vanity of human wishes.'

And here I must pause for a minute or two to separate the different
branches of our inquiry clearly from one another. For one thing, the
reader must please put for the present out of his head all thought of
the progress of 'civilisation'--that is to say, broadly, of the
substitution of wigs for hair, gas for candles, and steam for legs. This
is an entirely distinct matter from the phases of policy and religion.
It has nothing to do with the British Constitution, or the French
Revolution, or the unification of Italy. There are, indeed, certain
subtle relations between the state of mind, for instance, in Venice,
which makes her prefer a steamer to a gondola, and that which makes her
prefer a gazetteer to a duke; but these relations are not at all to be
dealt with until we solemnly understand that whether men shall be
Christians and poets, or infidels and dunces, does not depend on the way
they cut their hair, tie their breeches, or light their fires. Dr.
Johnson might have worn his wig in fulness conforming to his dignity,
without therefore coming to the conclusion that human wishes were vain;
nor is Queen Antoinette's civilised hair-powder, as opposed to Queen
Bertha's savagely loose hair, the cause of Antoinette's laying her head
at last in scaffold dust, but Bertha in a pilgrim-haunted tomb.

Again, I have just now used the words 'poet' and 'dunce,' meaning the
degree of each quality possible to average human nature. Men are
eternally divided into the two classes of poet (believer, maker, and
praiser) and dunce (or unbeliever, unmaker, and dispraiser). And in
process of ages they have the power of making faithful and formative
creatures of themse