what is understood by them as the religious sentiment in music; but that acceptance does not make a law for the Latin races,--for the Italians, the Spaniards and the French. Of the unequalled genius of Bach and of Handel, and of the large nobility of their music, there cannot be two opinions; but they wrote after the fashion of their day, and the musical style they adopted was not chosen because it was abstractly religious in character, but because it was the only style they knew, and it was the style common to the stage and the church, save that when adapted to the latter it was more contrapuntal in treatment. That choral fugues, single or double, strict or free, are radically or essentially religious in feeling, still remains to be proved. No man and no body of men are entitled to decide dogmatically that this or that style is the only one appropriate for sacred music. If Handel can be permitted to take airs written for purely dramatic works, and in what was then considered a purely dramatic spirit, by the most dramatic composer of his time, and use them for sacred works, why shall Verdi be condemned for composing his Requiem in a dramatic spirit, at first hand? It may be argued that Palestrina, among Italians, set the pattern for a dignified and undramatic style of church music; but it can also be urged, and with justice, that the music which Palestrina set to solemn words differed in no wise from the madrigals he composed to words of far other import. In judging Verdi's Requiem, as in judging other works of art ably and conscientiously made, we should try to look at it from the composer's point of view. In the abstract, there is nothing more suggestively sacred in the music of _I know that my Redeemer liveth_, than there is in that of _Home, Sweet Home_. The text makes the only difference. The foundation of the art and science of music is wholly arbitrary, but the laws of the school stop at the point at which the individuality and the imagination of the master composer begin to manifest themselves.