[Illustration: Young Scholar and his Wife. Painting by Gonzales Coques (1614-1684), in the Royal Gallery at Cassel.] Secondly, the popular song on its own side stands apart from counterpoint. Since counterpoint is the recognised style of the time, popular song has no choice but to appropriate that means of expression. Hence arises the Madrigal, the most festive form of this appropriation, which sets popular themes to many parts, but with the utmost art. It exhausts all the requirements of better taste in secular music in the sixteenth century. Societies like the Arcadeltian[7] have resulted in an extraordinary growth of published material, and it is no mere accident that this process has continued in England, thanks to the exertions of a Madrigal Society, down to our own time. Yet the popular song was too opposed to the choral setting to feel itself at home in this form long and universally. It tended to unison or to the total absence of words; in the latter case it could still remain contrapuntal and became simply a tone-piece;[8] in the former the counterpoint existed, so to speak, simply at the pleasure of the melody, as it did in hundreds of old melodies throughout the world. These old popular songs, of remarkable origin in their plain melodious orderliness, became finally the precursors of modern music. While they marked the monodic principle, and gave to the expression the full value which it had in all early music, they accustomed the ears to the pleasure of the fully-outlined melody, and compelled the combination with this of an equally well-outlined harmony. Thus the way was prepared for the great discovery of the monodic opera, which arose in Florence about 1600. But in that wonderful drama, which the emancipation of the secular or popular principle in the music of the sixteenth century presents, the instrument appears as the second agent, with its greater freedom as contrasted with the human voice. Choral counterpoint penetrates into the music of the future in the two ways of the one-part song and of the instrumental polyphony, which form a quite natural whole. In proportion as vocal music became more individual and more full of soul, the absolute instrumental music gained in meaning. But we must mark two impulses which necessarily condition each other. As the one-part song was, so to speak, a victory of the logic of expression over the metaphysic of many-parts, so the latter also was a transference of counterpoint to the instrument.