We know of a hundred attempts to improve the sound of the clavier, and make it more expressive. Here, too, the eighteenth century is the experimental preparation for the happy successes of the nineteenth. Now the string-choruses were tuned in octaves, now pedals were added for low notes, now the sound-boards were strengthened, now the lower strings were made of copper, and the higher of steel; and throughout a rich experience was acquired as to the best way of constructing the separate parts. Leather plectrums appear everywhere in order to make the tone softer and less metallic. The clavier, in fact, was made to imitate all possible orchestral instruments, and even such natural phenomena as thunder and lightning, by means of register-stops. Or, the forte and piano stops were combined, ever more artistically, into as many as two hundred and fifty permutations, so that an endless number of shades was possible. The solution of the problem was the modern hammer-clavier or pianoforte, in which the strings are no longer plucked but struck with hammers, so that every _nuance_ of touch depends on the fingers. The story of the pianoforte is the usual Story of Inventions. While people were labouring to solve the problem by theoretical calculation, it had long lain solved in an unsuspected fashion before them, and those who were slowly working at the practical realisation were personally forgotten, until a positively sufficient experience made the new invention popular. The beginnings of the pianoforte are therefore, as usual, obscure. The striking of the strings with hammers had long been the method employed in the dulcimer. At the beginning of the last century an artist named Pantaleon Hebenstreit was much talked of, who played the dulcimer so perfectly, that everyone was astounded at the new sound-effects. It is possible that his success gave the impulse: in any case, in the year 1711 there emerges in Italy an instrument called the pianoforte--because it could be played piano as well as forte--elaborated by a certain Bartolommeo Cristofori, who was soon forgotten. This instrument is clearly pictured in writings recently recovered as a hammer-clavier; Cristofori, as curator to Ferdinand de’ Medici, had a splendid collection of Belgian, French, and Italian Flügel-instruments to look after, the study of which, without doubt, aided him in his invention. His pianoforte, which at first shows a still more primitive technique, gradually draws sensibly nearer to the modern system; yet, on account of its unaccustomed tone and touch, it was unable to gain any appreciable results in the following decades. Cristofori could not have dreamt that an Italian society of our time would build a monument to him as inventor of the world-charming pianoforte, in the national sanctuary, the Santa Croce of Florence.