The dance then is the darling conception of French music; and French dances are the nucleus of all instrumental music. So early as 1530--for we can go back a great distance--the Paris printer, Attaignant, the oldest of French note-engravers, published all kinds of musical volumes “reduict de musique en la tablature du jeu d’Orgues, Espinettes, Manicordions,”[35] etc. We wonder to-day how M. Attaignant could transcribe his pieces “out of music” into the script of organs, spinets and monochords. But by “music” he meant nothing more nor less than song, and song, down to his day, was nothing more nor less than music. A few years after the German music-publisher Agricola[36] wrote:-- “Drumb lern singen du kneblein klein Itzund inn den jungen jarn dein, Recht nach musicalischer art Las aber keinen vleis gespart.” “Thou little boy, come learn to sing, Now, ere thy youth has taken wing. Let all be done with art refined, And give thereto thy heart and mind.” [E. E. K.] For music, he had once before said, is the foundation on which all instruments rest. Attaignant was one of the first to make transcripts of this “music” for keyed instruments. Nay, more; as far as our knowledge goes, he was the first who in general printed for such instruments. On his title-pages stand for the first time the words spinet and clavichord, although the claims of the organ are allowed. And it is noteworthy that the dances play the principal part in his books. Here the Frenchman already peeps out. Galliards, Basse-dances,[37] Branles, Pavans, are brought into a clear and relatively good harmonic form, without much complication of the instrumental parts. They are often, as for example in a charming Galliard in F major, of entrancing _naiveté_. Not too many runs in the treble, not too much harmony in the bass, and all exquisitely adapted for the instrument.[38] A hundred years after, the dance still rules French music, and not merely French music, but French life. The forms of social intercourse, as they were fashioned for the universal use of Europe at the court of the Parisian princes, were modelled on the broad rhythms of the dance. Going and coming, bowing and sitting, complimenting and smiling--all the pleasure in the formal beauty of hollow conventionalities, all this is nothing but the light and yet regulated step, the theatrical and yet sympathetic essence of the dance. The French people, having resolved to live their life, determined to do it prettily; and therefore to put even their ordinary motions and common gestures under the mild rule of the dancing master. Even in rough and ready England, traces of this are extant; witness the would-be grace of the formula of “introduction.”