The colorature or florid style, however, is only one of the varieties of Italian song. Side by side with it there has always been a charming, melodious _cantabile_, which in the later period of Italian opera gradually got the ascendancy. This _cantabile_ is often of exquisite beauty, and gives Italian and Italianized singers a chance to show off the mellow qualities of their voices to the best advantage. The very word _cantabile_ emphasizes, by antithesis, the unvocal character of the old florid style. _Fioritura_ means embroidery, while _cantabile_ means "song-like." But now, note how the sins of one period are visited on the next. The evils of the florid style did not terminate with its supremacy. They cast a shadow before, which prevented the real nature of human song from being discovered even after the vocal style had become more simple and rational. During the period in which the vocalists were in the habit of singing from a dozen to a hundred or more notes to a single syllable of the text, they, as well as the public, had become so indifferent to the words and their poetic meaning, that this habit could not at once be altered when the _cantabile_ style came more into vogue. The singers continued to be careless in regard to pronunciation of the words, and the opera libretti were so very silly that the public really did not care whether the singers spoke their words correctly and distinctly or not. Hence even the _cantabile_ style of Italian song continued to be more or less instrumental in character--telling the audience little more about the text than the flute or the violins told them about it. Mrs. Wodehouse, in her article on song in Grove's "Dictionary of Music and Musicians," calls attention to the injurious action of Italian opera on the English School by breeding indifference to the text. "From Handel's time until a very recent date," she says, "Italian operas and Italian songs reigned supreme in England; Italian singers and Italian teachers were masters of the situation to the exclusion of all others. And the habit thus contracted of hearing and admiring compositions in a foreign and unknown tongue, engendered in the English public a lamentable indifference to the words of songs, which reacted with evil effect both on the composer and the singer. Concerned only to please the ears of his audience, the composer neglected to wed his music to words of true poetic merit; and the singer quickly grew to be careless in his enunciation. Of how many singers, and even of good ones, may it not fairly be affirmed that at the end of the song the audience has failed to recognize its language?"