The important place which the Roman school of chant occupied in the history of Christian education will be seen in the following pages. Its value in our own day can hardly be appreciated, for the training of Christendom has long since ceased to be liturgical. But an era was about to open on the world during which the human intellect was no longer to receive its shape and colouring from the forms, however beautiful, of pagan antiquity, but from that Christian Muse whom our English poet has invoked. St. Gregory lived at a time when the old empire, with its letters and civilisation, was fast passing away. The little stone had struck the statue, and the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, had been carried away by the wind, and become as the chaff on the summer’s threshing-floor. He beheld new races rising out of the dust of fallen empires. What now are Homer and Horace to the grim Goth or savage Lombard who has spent his life in beating to pieces with his battle-axe the fairest monuments of Greece and Rome? To him no inspiration will flow from Castaly or Parnassus. The mossy fountains and the sylvan shades, The dreams of Pindus and the Aonian maids Delight no more, and the name of Woden is far more venerable in his eyes than that of Apollo. But there is _One_ Power that has caught him in its golden nets and holds his soul a willing captive. When the waters of baptism flowed over his brow he was brought face to face with that mighty Mother from whose hands he was to receive the knowledge of letters, and a far vaster education than the knowledge of letters alone can ever give. Heart, will, imagination, and understanding, all found their teacher in the Church of the Living God. Her sacred offices appealed to his soul through a thousand avenues, by their inspired ceremonial, their matchless poetry, their solemn melody, and their pictured art. The following pages will sadly fail of their main object if they do not succeed in conveying to the reader a faint notion of that marvellous education which the Church supplied to countless populations who, it may be, never learnt to read. Her Liturgy became the class-book of the barbaric races: it was to them all, and far more than all, that Homer or Ossian had been to the children of a darker age. What wonder, then, that the study of its musical language should be erected by them into a liberal art, and that those who were receiving their civilisation from the Rome, not of the Cæsars, but of the Popes, should welcome among them the teachers of the Roman music with as great enthusiasm as ever Florence in the fifteenth century, welcomed her professors of Greek?