Note 2 — Chapter XIII · THE WHITE-FACED DECTICUS: THE INSTRUMENT OF SOUND

There is no musical type anywhere, not even in the song of the Nightingale, celebrated by Buffon2 in grandiloquent terms. I have no wish to shock anybody; but why should I not give my opinion? Buffon’s style and the Nightingale’s song both leave me cold. The first has too much rhetoric about it and not enough sincere emotion. The second, a magnificent jewel-case of ill-assorted pearls of sound, makes so slight an appeal to the soul that a penny jug, filled with water and furnished with a whistle, will enable the lips of a child to reproduce the celebrated songster’s finest trills. A little earthenware machine, warbling at the player’s will, rivals the Nightingale.