Old Boetius--who had affection enough for both a first and a second
wife--tells, in his treatise on music, many anecdotes of the art's
influence, not only upon sickness but upon wrathful mobs bent on
mischief. He quotes Plato's statement that "the greatest caution is to
be taken not to suffer any change in well-moraled music, there being no
corruption of manners in a republic so great as that which follows a
gradual declination from a prudent and modest music; for whatever
corruptions are made in music, the minds of the hearers will immediately
suffer the same, it being certain that there is no way to the affections
more open than that of hearing."

The musician proverbially both plays upon and is a lyre. This
instrument, as is well known, was first made out of a vacant
turtle-shell, by Mercury, the god of gymnastic exercises and of theft,
that is to say, of technic, and of plagiarism. Mercury was nimble with
his affections also; among his progeny was the great god Pan, who is
frequently reported, and commonly believed, to be dead. Pan was so far
from beautiful that even his nurse could not find a compliment for him,
and in fact dropped him and ran. Considering what one usually expects of
a new-born infant, Pan must have been really unattractive. His lack of
personal charm was the origin of the invention of Pan's pipes or syrinx.
Miss Syrinx of the Naiad family--one of the first families of
Arcadia--was so horrified when Pan proposed to her, that she fled. He
pursued and she begged aid of certain nymphs who lived in a houseboat
on the river Ladon. When Pan thought to seize her, he found his arms
filled with reeds. How many a lover has pursued thus ardently some
charmer, only to find that when he has her, he has but a broken reed!
But Pan, noting that the wind was sighing musically about the reeds, cut
seven of them with a knife and bound them together as a pastoral pipe. A