About 1500 we meet with the first Old English clavier-pieces, as well as Aston’s Hornpipe, a variation on a popular song. A manuscript collection in the British Museum, known as the “Mulliner Book” (Mulliner was a master in St Paul’s School), offers us the earliest specimens of clavier-works of this kind, by various masters, from the middle of the sixteenth century. Many of the pieces by Thomas Tallis, the old master of this school, are exceedingly rhythmical. He was organist under four reigns--those of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary and Elizabeth. There is a canon in two parts, in lines which can be grasped at a glance, and which makes full use of sequential repetitions--a sure sign, from the early times of church music, of the advancing rhythmical consciousness. Gradually there is added to the canon a running bass, which at first sounds twice, and finally rolls forth quite unhindered, rendering the whole picture easily grasped by the eye. The unaided eye indeed, in these old pieces, is a good judge. Without being preoccupied by the archaism, which perhaps wearies the ear, it detects the intellectual art of the composer, as it were, at a certain distance. It observes the great and small curves of the voice-contours, sees the succession of the canonic themes, notices the parentheses in which long passages are confined, and the delight of the composer in the clearness of the pattern. It is indeed as a finely-sewn, carefully-fashioned pattern that we see an exercise of this kind, simply worked out, but richly adorned with broken chords--such, for example, as the figuration of the “Felix namque” which Tallis has as the third piece in the Fitzwilliam Virginal-Book. The _nuances_ of the accompaniment rejoice in their ornamental existence. William Bird, the pupil of Tallis, whose life reaches from 1538 or 1546 to 1623, would be reckoned as the father of modern piano-music, if only this English school had exerted some influence on art, and did not stand so isolated in musical history. We shall call him the first of the clavier-masters. Both organist and singer in the Royal Chapel, where both services were alternately demanded from all the adult musicians, he had a considerable interest in the monopoly of music printing and of the music paper duty which was granted by Elizabeth first to Tallis and then to him. A happy man he was not; he appears to have suffered more than most in the religious persecutions of the time. We have hardly a word in the authorities as to the hours of work of these old musicians; but indirectly we learn from the Act against Rogues and Vagabonds that private instruction was a not unusual _parergon_ of the musicians. [Illustration: Page from “Parthenia,” the first English engraved Clavier Music, 1611.]