It has, in perfection, three great qualities of the highest art--perfect skill in execution, commanding appeal to the purest emotions, and the power to leave the mind in a state of ecstatic rest or emotional contentment that makes one oblivious of the world while listening or watching. It was the outcome of an age of great religious enthusiasm. The monks had great dreams, and with them came the energy that inspired their brains to the utmost fulfilment. The dream that led to the Crusades is the one that has most appealed to the imagination of the world; but it was only one of many. "Sumer is icumen in" was written in a form that seems to have especially appealed to those early composers, for the _canon_[13] was a constant medium of musical expression in medi[ae]val times. That the reader may the more readily understand, I quote here a specimen that is at once beautiful and familiar to all, and is known as the "Morning Hymn." Its simplicity will make it intelligible to the least technically instructed of musical readers:-- [Illustration] It will be observed that the last four notes in the treble clef indicate the repetition of the melody, which can continue indefinitely as here represented. When we come to the consideration of instrumental music of olden times, we have little to guide us in the formation of any dear conception of its value or importance. It is evident, however, that up to the time of Purcell or that immediately preceding it, the state of development was altogether inferior to that of vocal music. For many centuries, except as regards its use in the Church, it occupied the humble position of handmaiden to the sister art of dancing. Such of it as still exists is, practically, all written in dance measure. The dances were, it is true, in varied forms and rhythms. Some were stately and even serious in character, and offered the composer an opportunity to display his skill in a more thankful task than in furnishing accompaniments to the lighter and more frivolous ones. Beautiful specimens of these are found in the compositions of William Byrd, John Ball, Orlando Gibbons, and others of the same period; they were mostly written for the virginals. To those living in this age of stupendous achievement in the art, the comparative simplicity and ineffectiveness of instrumentation may well seem strange, seeing to what a point of splendour vocal music had attained. The explanation is, I think, to be found in the defective nature of the instrument on which the composer had to rely to provide the sounds that his consciousness urged him to produce. The violin had yet to be brought to perfection through the genius of a Stradivarius, and time was needed to show its full capacities in the hands of a Paganini. The wind instruments, too, of the modern orchestra are of incomparable possibilities to those in use in the sixteenth century.