Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. II.djvu/132

142 ears the most beautiful of all the ancient tongues, and of the newer-modern Italian, Spanish, German, and English, which two last were very well declaimed. The Sclave language was deficient in elevated sound; the Chinese in all melody, the syllables tumbled one against another, and clattered disagreeably. The language of the Ethiopians, as well as of the South Sea islands, sounded like the beginning of languages; the latter, in particular, were more like animal sounds than perfected words, and the islanders who used them resembled half-animal human beings. They gave us also two little songs, consisting of few notes, melancholy and weak, but not without grace. The children of Africa had more character and more peculiar beauty in appearance and expression.

The actors in this scene were from two to three hundred youths—part of them almost children, the others approaching manhood—who sat on benches in a half circle, on the end of a kind of theatre. He who had to speak stepped forward on the stage, and when he had concluded was usually saluted by the audience with a little salvo of clapping, sometimes with one of laughter. The first part closed with a scene which they called La confusion de la tour de Babel, in which all the actors began at once to say, or to sing mass, each one in his tongue, which produced a horrible charivari, and was received with general laughter and loud clapping of hands.

“Is this indeed a religious festival?” exclaimed, with indignation, a young Swedish lady who sat near me.

In the second part, King David himself, in the