occasionally seeing one another face to face, that for a long time it was their custom to appoint a day in every year, on which the masculine members of the family should assemble in one of the chosen centers. The many happy hours which they passed together on these occasions were devoted to the narration of their respective experiences, interspersed with music as a means of recreation. They generally began with the singing of a choral, which was followed by livelier airs, often set to words free and unconstrained. They were especially fond of "quodlibets," a kind of musical medley, more or less skillfully composed of every sort of merry popular melody, or, as frequently happened, the singers depended upon their own powers of improvisation. Taken as a whole, the Bachs were characterized by a strong love of pleasure, which, however, was by no means incompatible with their sincere and fervent piety. If one takes into account the low order of cultivation prevailing in Germany at that early period, the artistic excellence attained by this family becomes all the more remarkable. Its musical promise was first revealed in the time of the Thirty Years' War, and it was during the second half of the seventeenth century, when the moral, intellectual and material strength of the nation was at its lowest ebb, that the promise was gloriously fulfilled. Simultaneously with the earliest manifestations of activity in other provinces of intellectual life, German music attained in Sebastian Bach a height so lofty that it has never been surpassed, and from this fact two deductions may be drawn: first, in spite of the sufferings consequent upon the Thirty Years' War, there had remained implanted in the inmost hearts of the people a vital germ of great productive power; and, second, the best of which the German nation was capable in the first century after the war, found expression through this family of artists. It is also noteworthy in respect to the German people, that the first creative impulse by which they were stirred was in the direction of music, and that, in the unsounded depths of feeling from which this impulse springs, they found compensation for the loss of those earthly possessions upon which unmerciful fate had laid its destroying hand. Something like a law of nature is moreover to be discovered in the fact that German musical art at that time, whether ecclesiastical or secular in character, developed itself chiefly in the instrumental line. The essential foundation of both these styles is represented by the _Volkslied_, which must be regarded as the most direct and unperverted utterance of the popular imagination. The _Tanzlied_, at first sung by the people, but later always played, forms the fundamental element of the instrumental music of that day. The ecclesiastical music of the seventeenth century, however, that which alone has a right to the name in the strictest sense, was developed in and through the science of organ composition.