from the mysteries of Apis, it is probable that the dancing was copied from that of the Egyptians on those occasions.”  There was an annual dance in Shiloh on the sacred festival; and David danced before the ark.  Again, in Greece the like relation is everywhere seen; the original type being there, as probably in other cases, a simultaneous chanting and mimetic representation of the life and adventures of the god.  The Spartan dances were accompanied by hymns and songs; and in general the Greeks had “no festivals or religious assemblies but what were accompanied with songs and dances”—­both of them being forms of worship used before altars.  Among the Romans, too, there were sacred dances:  the Salian and Lupercalian being named as of that kind.  And even in Christian countries, as at Limoges, in comparatively recent times, the people have danced in the choir in honour of a saint.  The incipient separation of these once united arts from each other and from religion, was early visible in Greece.  Probably diverging from dances partly religious, partly warlike, as the Corybantian, came the war dances proper, of which there were various kinds; and from these resulted secular dances.  Meanwhile Music and Poetry, though still united, came to have an existence separate from dancing.  The aboriginal Greek poems, religious in subject, were not recited, but chanted; and though at first the chant of the poet was accompanied by the dance of the chorus, it ultimately grew into independence.  Later still, when the poem had been differentiated into epic and lyric—­when it became the custom to sing the lyric and recite the epic—­poetry proper was born.  As during the same period musical instruments were being multiplied, we may presume that music came to have an existence apart from words.  And both of them were beginning to assume other forms besides the religious.  Facts having like implications might be cited from the histories of later times and people:  as the practices of our own early minstrels, who sang to the harp heroic narratives versified by themselves to music of their own composition:  thus uniting the now separate offices of poet, composer, vocalist, and instrumentalist.  But, without further illustration, the common origin and gradual differentiation of Dancing, Poetry, and Music will be sufficiently manifest.

The advance from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous is displayed not only in the separation of these arts from each other and from religion, but also in the multiplied differentiations which each of them afterwards undergoes.  Not to dwell upon the numberless kinds of dancing that have, in course of time, come into use; and not to occupy space in detaining the progress of poetry, as seen in the development of the various forms of metre, of rhyme, and of general organisation; let us confine our attention to music as a type of the group.  As argued by Dr. Burney, and as implied by the customs of still extant barbarous races, the first musical instruments were, without doubt, percussive—­sticks, calabashes, tom-toms—­and were used simply to mark the time of the dance; and in this constant repetition of the same sound, we see music in its most homogeneous form.