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TOC
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uncopied, and yet the Conservatorios
or musical schools, the Operas, or the Ora-
torios, have scarce been mentioned; and
though every library is crowded with
histories of painting and other arts, as well
as with the lives of their most illustrious
professors, music and musicians have
been utterly neglected. And this is still
the more unaccountable, as no one of the
liberal arts is at present so much culti-
vated, and encouraged, nor can the Ita-
lians now boast a superiority over the
rest of Europe in any of them so much as in
music; for few of their painters, sculp-
tors, architects, historians, poets, or phi-
losophers of the present age, as in some
centuries past, so greatly surpass their
cotemporaries on this side the Alps, as to
excite much curiosity to visit or converse
with them.
But music still lives in Italy, while
most of the other arts only speak a dead
language; classical and learned indeed,
but less pleasing and profitable to stu-
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