The custom of adding decorative titles was made universal by the lute-players, but the tone-painting must always have been of the slightest. Otherwise the old historian of the lute, Baron, could not have been so irritated at them as to write, some decades later, “Gallot has given such strange names to his pieces that we have need of close study to see their relation with the subject. For example, when he wishes to express thunder and lightning on the lute, it is a pity he has never added a note to tell us _when_ it lightens and _when_ it thunders.” (We are reminded of the old English clavier-piece on the same theme.) “We shall seldom,” he adds, “light on a French piece but the name of some noble dame is attached to it, after whom, if she so pleases, the piece is named.” The clavier-players adopted this custom all the more willingly as their instrument, so full of resource and so capable of expressing shades of meaning, allowed them to raise these titles from their decorative and shadowy existence into genuine programme-inscriptions. We see this remarkable process clearly exhibited in Chambonnières, a clavier-player who towers in solitary grandeur, and marks an epoch by his introduction of the clavier _suite_, by the clear adaptation of his dances to the clavier, by the first realistic use of these titles, and by the establishment of a precise character in the clavier-piece, which holds its ground even to-day. He is not, like William Bird, the original of modern clavier-music, but its actual father, from whom a straight unbroken line stretches down to the present day.