Portia enters the moonlit garden and hears the gentle tones, not knowing whence they come. She feels keenly the eternal magic of invisible music which lies pillowed in silence and night. The whole scene is a hymn on the infelt soul of musical self-centredness, wherein man finds his best self. So too, perhaps, stood Shakespeare by the spinet of his beloved, and to his musical sense the tones and the love are blended together, his loved one becoming transfigured into music:-- “How oft when thou, my music, music playest, Upon that blessed wood whose motion sounds With thy sweet fingers, when thou gently swayest The wiry concord that mine ear confounds, Do I envy those jacks[4] that nimble leap To kiss the tender inward of thy hand, Whilst my poor lips, that should that harvest reap, At the wood’s boldness by thee blushing stand. To be so tickled, they would change their state And situation with those dancing chips, O’er whom thy fingers walk with gentle gait, Making dead wood more blessed than living lips. Since saucy jacks[4] so happy are in this, Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.” It is in the Elizabethan age that the clavier begins for the first time to play a part in the world. In the English clavier-music, as in all English music at that time, there is a ravishing bloom, which vanished just as quickly from the popular concerts, never to appear again. Circumstances combined to favour it. A certain repose, a dependence upon art came upon the London society of that day, and at such times art penetrates easily into the privacy of the home. For centuries had the Low Countries held the sway of music; but the art of tone, which had made its way thither under the stars of Dufay, Okeghem, and Josquin des Près, remained in the service of the Church. It represented the rapid development of contrapuntal vocal harmony, as it had slowly developed itself into music _per se_ from the figurations, which at the end of the tenth century began to found themselves on the _canto fermo_ of the Gregorian material. Around the Gregorian pillars there had arisen a mathematical system of rules and proportions; of musical vaultings, symmetries, and mouldings, in which the ordering world-spirit seemed to have realised itself. As yet, however, there was no melody whose contour was unifying; no harmony whose development was to be foreseen; no singing voice resting on the support of an accompaniment. The voices ran according to the laws of their _tempi_, all equally important from soprano to bass; and their harmony only aided in reducing them to an average. The _instrument_ of this great sacred music was the human voice, at first only the bearer of the tone, but then gradually here and there betraying a greater depth of feeling: and yet this great function of