school, and with him and his successors acquired much stateliness and beauty. Its influence on the opera, however, was not good, at least if we adopt the opinion of those Florentine Hellenes and of Wagner, for it developed music as an independent element, and did not subordinate it to dramatic action. With the exception of this misdevelopment of the opera, all music evolved brilliantly and well in Italy, and especially in Naples, which eclipsed all other cities, and showed that she, too, had her individual genius. Alessandro Scarlatti (1659-1725) wrote a great number of operas and oratorios, and composed a vast quantity of ecclesiastical music. He was followed by his son Domenico Scarlatti, by Durante, Leo, and Jommelli, by Pergolesi, Piccinni, Cimarosa, and Paisiello, who followed one another, like a flight of singing birds, through the eighteenth century. The Italian opera, even then, had the characteristics of subordinating dramatic propriety and all semblance of reality to _arias_, trills, and vocal exaggeration, but it was not till the beginning of the nineteenth century--with Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti--that the Italian opera (if I may venture to adapt a famous phrase) became melted Baroque. There were other schools of music at Rome, Bologna, and Venice. It was in Venice that the four famous asylums for girls, _conservatori_, were turned into music schools, and gave their name to training schools for musicians all over the world. Besides the opera one must note, in mentioning Italian musical genius, the violin-makers, the Amati of Cremona, the greater Stradivarius (1644-1737), and other famous makers of Cremona, Brescia, and Venice; also the organ-builders, the Antignati of Brescia; the great Italian singers, then as now favourites of the world; as well as the greatest of libretto-writers, Metastasio. Metastasio (1698-1782) had a career that can only be compared to that of a successful _prima donna_. As a boy he was adopted by the Arcadian lawyer, Gravina, and brought early to drink of the Pierian spring. After Gravina's death he spent his money, got into the company of singers and musicians at Naples, and composed the words of an opera "Dido," while still a youth of five-and-twenty. "Dido" had immense success, and from this time on Metastasio poured out play after play in words that went halfway and more to meet the accompanying music. His renown was triumphant throughout Europe; he became the pet of lords, ladies, kings, and Popes. He flitted from court to court, and sipped the honey of facile success; he serves as the embodiment of the Italian opera, or rather as a poetical spirit, a kind of baroque nightingale, to chant the charm, the sentiment, the sweetness, the unreality, of these two make-believe centuries.