a mixed art of quite extraordinary latitude in style, form, dramatic purpose, and musical texture. It will be sufficient for our purposes, therefore, to state that both sacred and secular plays with music have existed from the earliest times, and that their development has tended toward the form as we now know it. The introduction of songs into plays was, in itself, so agreeable and interesting that their use continually increased until some vague operatic form was reached in which music predominated. But there are two great revolutionary epochs to which proper attention must be paid if we are to understand opera at all. The first of these is the so-called “Florentine Revolution” in the years 1595 to 1600, and the second is the Wagnerian reform in the middle of the last century. II. OPERA IN THE OLD STYLE The “Florentine Revolution” was an attempt to create an entirely new type of opera in which all tradition was thrown to the winds. To “Eurydice,” the best known of these Florentine operas, its composer, Peri, wrote a preface, from which we quote the following: “Therefore, abandoning every style of vocal writing known hitherto, I gave myself up wholly to contriving the sort of imitation (of speech) demanded by this poem.” (Is this, indeed, Peri speaking? Or is it Gluck, or Wagner, or Debussy?) In any case, the abandonment, in any form of human expression, of every style known hitherto is a fatal abandonment, for no art, or science, or literature can throw away its past and live. The Florentine Revolution was not revolution, but riot, for it undertook to tear down what generations had been slowly building up, and to substitute in its place something not only untried but (at that time) impossible. It was an attempt to found a new art _entirely detached_ from an old one. Beethoven without Haydn and Mozart, Meredith without Fielding, the Gothic without the Classical, a Renaissance without a birth, daylight without sunrise. It was an entirely illogical proceeding from first to last, but opera came forth from it because opera can subsist--it has, and does--without logic or even reasonableness.