The medieval chant and the popular folk-song came together, and the science of music was born. Sculpture reached perfection in Greece, painting in Italy, portraiture in Holland; but Germany, the land of thought, has given us nearly all the great musicians and nine-tenths of all our valuable musical compositions. Holland has taken a very important part in every line of art and handicraft, and in way of all-round development has set the pace for civilization. Art follows in the wake of commerce, for without commerce there is neither surplus wealth nor leisure. The artist is paid from what is left after men have bought food and clothing; and the time to enjoy comes only after the struggle for existence. When Venice was not only Queen of the Adriatic but of the maritime world as well, Art came and established there her Court of Beauty. It was Venice that mothered Giorgione, Titian, the Bellinis, and the men who wrought in iron and silver and gold, and those masterful bookmakers; it was beautiful Venice that gave sustenance and encouragement to Stradivari (who made violins as well as he could) up at Cremona, only a few miles away. But there came a day when all those seventy bookmakers of Venice ceased to print, and the music of the anvils was stilled, and all the painters were dead, and Venice became but a monument of things that were, as she is today; for Commerce is King, and his capital has been moved far away. So Venice sits sad and solitary--a pale and beautiful ruin, pathetic beyond speech, infested by noisy shop-keepers and petty pilferers, the degenerate sons of the robbers who once roamed the sea and enthroned her on her hundred isles. All that Venice knew was absorbed by Holland. The Elzevirs and the Plantins took over the business of the seventy bookmakers, and the art-schools of Amsterdam, Leyden and Antwerp reproduced every picture of note that had been done in Venice. The great churches of Holland are replicas of the churches of Venice. And the Cathedral at Antwerp, where the sweet bells have chimed each quarter of an hour for three centuries, through peace and plenty, through lurid war and sudden death--there where hangs Rubens' masterpiece--that Cathedral is but an enlarged "Santa Maria de' Frari," where for two hundred years hung "The Assumption," by Titian. In these churches of Holland were placed splendid organs, and the priests formed choirs, and offered prizes for the best singing and the best compositions. Music and painting developed hand in hand; for at the last, all of the arts are one--each being but a division of labor. The world owes a great debt to the Dutch. It was Holland taught England how to paint and how to print, and England taught us: so our knowledge of printing and painting came to us by way of the apostolic succession of the Dutch.