To this general rule music is no exception--mediæval music was the child, nursling, and hand-maid of the Church. It is true that there did grow up, in the lyrical songs of troubadours and minstrels, a kind of popular music that had in many respects more vitality, individuality, and beauty than the more conventional ecclesiastical art; and that the latter, at many stages in its development, had to draw fresh inspiration from the humble popular minstrels. But in the middle ages, when the common people were entirely illiterate, and all intellectual concerns were in the hands of priests, who alone could read, write, and preserve manuscripts and artistic traditions, it was inevitable that the only recognized music, stamped with the seal of age and authority, should be that of the ecclesiastical choristers. The student of the infancy of music has to direct his attention, not to the mediæval world at large, but to the cathedrals and the monasteries of that intensely clerical age. For the modern mind, permeated as it is with the instincts of liberty and individualism, and perhaps especially for the American mind, naturally radical and irreverent, it is difficult to conceive the degree in which all the rites, customs, and beliefs of the mediæval Catholic Church were matters of traditional authority. There was not a word of the liturgy, not a tone of the plain chant to which it was sung, not a gesture of the priest nor a genuflexion of the worshippers, that was not prescribed by what was considered supreme dictation and hallowed by immemorial practice.[8] The liturgy, or text of the Mass, the skeleton and fixed basis, so to speak, of the ritual as a whole, began to take shape in the hands of the apostles themselves; was developed by a gradual accretion of prayers, hymns, responses, and readings from Scripture; was translated into Latin and adopted by the Roman Church; and became fixed in practically its present form so early as the end of the sixth century. When we consider the almost superstitious regard in which its great antiquity caused it to be held, and when we reflect that the musical setting used with it was considered a mere appanage to the sacred words, we can understand the slow development of music in the first eleven centuries of the Christian era. In taking its first steps music was not merely hampered by its own uncertainty and infantile feebleness; it was paralyzed by servile dependence on a text swathed within the bandages of priestly convention.