From these few biographical notices we figure him as a restless ambitious spirit. As the peaceful life of a mediæval painter is to the splendid existence of the seventeenth century artists, so is the relation of Bird to Bull. And Bull’s works exhibit many of the lineaments of an elegant _faiseur_.[27] He is not so fond as Bird of the primeval freshness of the popular songs and dances, nor does he work out his pieces with Bird’s virgin purity. The side-issue is often with him the main object; the figuration is often licentious, and both hands vie in the performance of the closest and most difficult passages. Often, indeed, his pieces assume a grotesque appearance, hard and antiquated harmonies, in which the leading note is conspicuous by its absence, being crossed with runs in semiquavers, dotted rhythms, rapidly intruded chords, four-fold imitations, syncopated grace-notes, mingled two and three-time passages in wild and bewildering confusion. The eye looks as it were on a specimen of Indian ornamentation, in which, among the confused lines, a pure human feature is almost indistinguishable. From the first piece of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, Bull’s thirty “Walsingham” Variations, which later Bird treats so much more simply, the executant shines out in his whole personality. There are thirty studies on figure motives which in Bird are reduced to a dozen. The semiquavers run like will of the wisps in their most unsubstantial courses, resembling endless chains, which are here and there interrupted with leaps of a sixth or seventh, to knit them together in the self-same run higher up or lower down. The ornamentation is richer than with Bird, melting in its _sfumato_[28] the lines of the voice almost after the manner of Couperin. The clavier, even more than the organ, lent itself, with its isolated tones, to such trills, slurs, and mordents,[29] which give to the sound an apparently longer existence. It is these that, down to the time of the German classical music, give the stamp to the special physiognomy of the clavier-piece. I called them just now _sfumato_. As in painting the sharp outline of the body gradually gives way to greater truth to nature, and in Lionardo is replaced by the specifically pictorial obliteration of the _sfumato_, by which, so to speak, we see round the corners; so the ornamentation in these pieces, in which the clavier is seeking its own means of expression, assumes the habit of obliterating its thin outlines until finally the figures thus obtained regulate the lines of the melody as a fixed motif, or even become an end in themselves. It takes an inner effort before we can transplant ourselves into this old world of ornamentation. We must learn to feel it as it would be played by the old masters: we must, if possible, play it ourselves on old and lightly-responding spinets. Our heavy and serious pianos are unsuitable to them; they sound too forcibly and harshly.