the voice had a value for expression which is not to be underrated. Even in this mathematical tone-system there lay the power of exhibiting nature as she is. [Illustration: Orlando Gibbons. After Grignon’s engraving in Hawkins.] If art was to escape from these rudiments into more intimate circles, the appropriate social surroundings must be provided. _The home_ must develop. The public art of the Middle Ages had divided its favours between church and hall; it was in the church that counterpoint found its development; it was in the hall that the old popular song, without making special advance, maintained itself. The popular song ranged itself over against counterpoint, for it was pure melody, as we understand melody to-day, and it was well arranged as to rhythm in four or eight-bar “strains.”[5] In two ways, however, counterpoint and popular song might meet: the first might absorb the second, or _vice versa_. It is well known what took place when counterpoint absorbed the popular song: throughout the later Middle Ages popular songs, even the vulgarest, are taken up in masses or motets as motives for figures; nay, more, when they alternate, while the Gregorian _cantus_ holds its own alongside, church hymns are named after popular songs, and we stumble everywhere upon masses named after their underlying melody,[6] “L’homme armé,” “Malheur me bat,” “O Venus,” and the like. But, as might be expected, these are taken up utterly into the framework of the voice-mathematic; their peculiar aroma disappears; they are thrown into contrapuntal form. Far from betraying a worldly element, such as Ambrose conveyed under allegorical paintings of old landscape in religious pictures, they betray on the contrary a total absence of the secular sense. To them the content of the melody is so indifferent that they never once display it.