The “isolation” of the early English clavier school is fairly explained by the immense amount of attention that was now given, from 1600-1695, in England, to the development of the dramatic scena or cantata, for one or two voices, to the song, and to the cultivation of concerted music for strings and keyed instruments. It is only to prevent any one from supposing that there was _no_ “secular” music in England between the days of Elizabeth and the coming of Purcell that I give a few names, all of which have a real claim to remembrance. Songs--Campion (flourished 1600), Johnson (1600), Cæsar (early 17th cent.), Cooper (1612), Laneare (1620), H. Lawes (1630), Wilson (1640). Cantatas or “Scenas”--H. Lawes (1630), C. Colman (1640). Instrumental music--Gregorie (mid. 17th cent.), Jenkins (1630), W. Lawes (1630), Lock (1650), Sympson (1660). [Illustration: D’Anglebert, Chamber Musician to Louis XIV., after Mignard.] Old French Dance-Pieces The independent musical fame of England--omitting Purcell, the evening star--rests solely on this early period. Hence we have been led to trace the musical history of England further back than that of countries where the stream spread over a wider area. Old English music, indeed, had no influence worthy of the name. It stands, like a half-mediæval prelude, before the actual history of the piano. It is true that it shows the forces which are to work in the future; but they are not yet brought into the line which they are constantly and exclusively to follow. This process begins rather in France; it unites itself later with a second movement which comes from Italy, and follows a broader and more lively path through Germany until it reaches our own times. Oskar Fleischer, the founder of the splendid Berlin collection of old musical instruments, has endeavoured, in his book on Gaultier, the great French lute-player, to describe English and French relations in the seventeenth century. But the hints which, in his view, the elder Gaultier[33] gained in England, are only matters of execution. Flourishes which in England were marked, without precise discrimination, with / or //, found a more exact representation among French lutenists. I do not mean that every performer did not put his own interpretation upon them. Every lutenist or clavier-player issues a new code of these _agréments_; but the basis remains essentially the same, and it is possible that the flourishes were adopted, by an impulse derived from England, into lute-music and thence into clavier-music. Thence they soon spread themselves over the whole musical field. But it is a mistake to imagine that these _agréments_, which infest old French compositions like locusts, were a peculiarity of the country, the “style galant” of France. The peculiarity lies elsewhere, in the form, in the dance.