ABSTRACT
Having often tyred you with discourses of several parts of musick, wherein you desired to receive satisfaction, without obtaining the effect I proposed to my self; I reflected upon the saying, that no man understands that which he cannot so express as to make another understand it, 1 and doubted whether the hypothesis I entertained were not founded upon errours, which I had swallowed without any due examination. I resolved for tryal of it, to trace my notions as near their principles as I could, and set them down in method, that I might discover whether they were well deduced from one another, and from such experiments as I had in memory. Having done this I send them to you, as the severest judge I know. It has not been your custome to flatter me, and now I desire your censure, if I may impose it upon you to give it in writing, wherein you will be obliged to quote what I say truly, before you object to it, and to stand to those allegations and inferences you will set down for your own, in both which respects I had great disadvantage in discourse. I shall prevent you in condemning the stile, for being too contracted2 and obscure; and you must take the fault to your self when you know it does not proceed from the aversion I have to philologie, 3 but that I thought it would be labour lost to enlarge, when writing to so great a philosopher and musician as you are, I cannot fail of being understood. [(p. iv)] In other things I expose it to you; and if I shall receive plain confutations, it will not much disappoint or mortifie me. For I have hardly in my whole life made one set experiment upon this subject, nor know many of the instruments I have spoken of. But what I heard from others, or
1 FN may have adapted this saying from what he had learned as a pupil at the King Edward VI free grammar school, Bury St. Edmunds, since, according to John Aubrey, FN's 'tutor (as his Lordship told me) made him properly to understand what he read to him before he left him, so no doubt was left upon him'. Aubrey supposed that this practice was. the basis not only for learning grammar but also for learning 'all the arts'. See Stephens (ed.), Aubrey on Education, pp. 56, 163.
