The music of Couperin has something of this feminine quality. It is more truly “virginal” music than that which Queen Elizabeth once played in her quiet chamber. But its grace is not hidden; it is coquettish and conscious of itself. It is the high style of grace which belongs to the French culture of the eighteenth century. A spinet stands on a smooth parquet, and the ladies sit around with their roguish eyes and tip-tilted noses, smiling at all the well-recognised allusions, as the then flourishing pastel-art has fixed them for us in light colours. It is light, entertaining music, in which the thoughts of their own accord run on bright and resplendent paths. Short pieces; _courantes_ with their lively, scarcely broken triple-rhythms; _allemandes_ in their decorous and interwoven quadruple time; _minuets_ with their pretty, melodious triple rhythm; _chaconnes_ and _passacaglie_ rearing their piquant erections on slow-moving basses; _sarabands_ in their triple movements and interesting national colouring; _gavottes_ with their graceful movement in soft two-time, the hurrying fugal _gigues_, and all the many other unnamed dances--all these give the ear, without exertion, a subtle delight. The rondo-form takes a supreme rank; it is constantly growing from a simple round-dance with refrain into a genuine clavier-composition, seeming to forebode the sonata which still remains unborn within it. Its theme, like a Ritornel, recurs among the “couplets” or episodical passages; but it is only seldom that the couplets set themselves in conscious opposition to the theme. Usually they adopt its rhythm or the character of its melody, and play with it until, neatly and gracefully, they glide back into the theme itself. There is no iron rigidity of thematic handling. A delicate colour-sense holds the parts together. Couperin does not regulate his pieces according to any definite scheme of dance-successions; he binds the dance and the non-dance, the piece in one or more sections, together into one bouquet which he offers to his lady-friends, often with a polite dedication appended, under the general title of “Ordre.” Twenty-seven such “Ordres,” in four volumes, were published by him between 1713 and 1730. [Illustration: Concert. Painting by Gerard Terborch (1617-1681), in the Royal Museum at Berlin.]