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 wise fellow he, and could profit even from a jilt.

The eminent musician Arion, the inventor of glee clubs—­a fact which should not be cherished against him—­seems to have loved no one except himself, and therein to have had no rivals.  The famous fish story to the effect that when he was compelled to leap into the sea, by certain mariners, he was carried to shore on the back of a dolphin, is only Jonah’s adventure turned inside out.

Another early soloist was Orpheus, the beautiful love story of whose life is common property.  He was torn to pieces by frantic women, a fate that seems always to threaten some of our prominent pianists and violinists at the hands of the matinee Bacchantes.

The patron saint of Christian music, Saint Cecilia, had a remarkable married life, including a platonic affair with an angel; which caused her pagan husband a certain amount of natural anxiety.  Geoffrey Chaucer can tell you the legend of her martyrdom with the crystal charm of all his poesy.

The early Christian Church with its elaborate vocal worship accomplished much for the cause of music, but also, with its vast encouragement to the monastic life and to celibacy, coerced a great number of musicians to be monks.  This banishes them from a place here—­not by any means because their being monks prevented their having love affairs, but because it greatly prevented a record of most of them—­though happily not all.  Abelard, for instance, was a monk, and his Heloise became a nun, and their love letters are among the most precious possessions in literature.  Liszt, that Hungarian rhapsodist in amours, was he not also an abbe?  There was a priest-musician, George de la Hele, who about 1585 gave up a lucrative