It will throw a little more light upon the customs of that day to mention _cicisbeismo_, an unwritten rule of an artificial and idle society, which prescribed that a lady should have a _cavaliere servente_, a gentleman dangling in attendance upon her. Every lady had a husband, as maidens were not allowed in society, and widows had to choose between a convent and a second marriage; but the husband could not wait upon her, for his own duty as _cavaliere servente_ required him to be in attendance upon somebody else's wife. The duties of the _cavaliere servente_ were to devote himself solely to his lady, to write _billets-doux_, compose sonnets to her lapdog, to hand her chocolate at _conversazioni_, to give her his arm on all occasions, to ride beside her coach when she was out driving, and so on. In fact, he was required to do all those little offices, _petits soins_, which a young gentleman is accustomed to render to the lady whom he is engaged to marry. It was a state of active flirtation, not only sanctioned but required by society. It is said that in some cases the _cavaliere servente_ was agreed upon before marriage, and his name inserted in the marriage contract. Besides Goldoni's comic drama and the "Commedia dell'Arte" this Baroque Italy gave the world another and far more important gift, the Opera. Italian genius flared up once more and led the world in music. As far back as the days of the Council of Trent the reforming spirit of the Church found its noblest expression in Palestrina's (1524?-94) masses, but after his death, after the Catholic Revival had lost its deeply serious feeling, music took another step. Florence, the old home of genius, was the spot. A group of music lovers, who were full of classic theories about art, wished to revive antique Greek drama, with its combination of poetry, music, and dance. They decided that the words were the chief element, that the music must be subservient to the full emotional expression of the poetry, must intensify the dramatic significance of the story. To give effect to their opinion they devised a method of setting music to declamation, the earliest form of recitative. They meant to revive the Greek drama, but they produced the opera. After a few years of work over the new ideas, in 1600, at the Pitti Palace, an opera was publicly performed in honor of the espousals of Maria dei Medici and Henry IV of France. This was the first public performance of a secular opera. Soon afterwards Monteverdi (1567-1643), a revolutionary genius in the history of music, produced his operas at Mantua. In 1637 the first public opera house was opened in Venice; others quickly followed; the opera became a favourite diversion, and Italian singers carried it to France, Germany, Austria, and England. In the same year as the performance in the Pitti Palace, a dramatic oratorio, "The Soul and the Body," was publicly performed in Rome. The oratorio was greatly developed by Carissimi (1604-74) of the Roman