For the tautology; you have, with their vain mysterious art, twice repeated; magic charms can ne'er relieve you, three times. Nor can heal the wounded heart, three times. Godlike wisdom from above, twice; and, this alone can deceive you, two or three times. But this is reasonable when compared with the Monster Polypheme, the Monster Polypheme, a hundred times over and over, in his admired Acis and Galatea.
As to the screaming; perhaps I cannot find a fair instance in this song; but whoever has frequented our operas will remember many. And yet here methinks the words no and e'er, when sung to these notes, have a little of the air of screaming, and would actually be screamed by some singers.
I send you inclosed the song with its music at length. Read the words without the repetitions. Observe how few they are, and what a shower of notes attend them: you will then perhaps be inclined to think with me, that though the words might be the principal part of an ancient song, they are of small importance in a modern one; they are in short only a pretence for singing.
I am, as ever,
Your affectionate brother,
B. FRANKLIN.
P. S. I might have mentioned inarticulation among the defects in common speech that are assumed as beauties in modern singing. But as that seems more the fault of the singer than of the composer, I omitted it in what related merely to the composition. The fine singer in the present mode, stifles all the hard consonants, and polishes away all the rougher parts of words that serve to distinguish them one from another; so that you hear nothing but an admirable pipe, and understand no more of the song, than you would from its tune played on any other instrument. If ever it was the ambition of musicians to make instruments that should imitate the human voice, that ambition seems now reversed, the voice aiming to be like an instrument. Thus wigs were first made to imitate a good natural head of hair;—but when they became fashionable, though in unnatural forms, we have seen natural hair dressed to look like wigs.