But if the music of the sixteenth century was lacking in harmonic cogency and intensity, it was not for that reason either incoherent or inexpressive. It had its own sort of coherence, its own type of eloquence, both depending on melodic rather than on harmonic qualities. Music was to Palestrina and his fellows entirely a matter of melody, not of harmony at all. The reader needs only to glance again at Figure III, attending not to the chords and their sequence, but to the individual voices, one after another, to see that in their own way the phrases hang together firmly, and say efficiently what they mean. Each of the four voices has an intelligible and expressive part, and if together they sound a little strange, singly they are eminently good. The more one studies this old music the more one realizes that it is all melody; from beginning to end, from top to bottom, the mediæval scores _sing_. They are not, like many modern works, full of inert, lifeless matter, tones put in to fill out the harmonies, and having no melodic excuse for being. In the modern monophonic style, in which but one melody sings, the remaining parts are almost inevitably treated by the composer as affording rather a logical sequence of harmonies than a subsidiary tissue of melodic strands. In the sixteenth century, on the other hand, harmony was the accident, melody the essence; any chord would do very well in any place, provided it were consonant enough not to offend the ear; but every tone must have a melodic reason for being; it must be a point in a line; all the lines must be conducted with draughtsman-like deftness and economy. Melodic life is accordingly the supreme trait of the style well named polyphonic.