In this “familiar style” which we may trace backward to the age of the Netherlanders, we find a remote anticipation of the modern harmonic feeling. A vague sense of complementary colors of tonic and dominant, caught perhaps from the popular music with which the most scientific composers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries always kept closely in touch, is sometimes evident for brief moments, but never carried out systematically to the end. This plain style is employed in hymns and short sentences, in connection with texts of an especially mournful or pleading expression, as, for instance, the Improperia and the Miserere, or, for contrast’s sake, in the more tranquil passages of masses or motets. It is a style that is peculiarly tender and gracious, and may be found reflected in the sweetest of modern Latin and English hymn-tunes. In the absence of chromatic changes it is the most serene form of music in existence, and is suggestive of the confidence and repose of spirit which is the most refined essence of the devotional mood. Example of the Simple Style (_stile famigliare_). Palestrina. The intricate style commonly prevails in larger works—masses, motets, and the longer hymns. Only after careful analysis can we appreciate the wonderful art that has entered into its fabrication. Upon examining works of this class we find the score consisting of four or more parts, but not usually exceeding eight. The most obvious feature of the design is that each part appears quite independent of the others; the melody does not lie in one voice while the others act as accompaniment, but each part is as much a melody as any other; each voice pursues its easy, unfettered way, now one acting as leader, now another, the voices often crossing each other, each melody apparently quite regardless of its mates in respect to the time of beginning, culminating, and ending, the voices apparently not subject to any common law of accent or rhythm, but each busy with its own individual progress. The onward movement is like a series of waves; no sooner is the mind fixed upon one than it is lost in the ordered confusion of those that follow. The music seems also to have no definite rhythm. Each single voice part is indeed rhythmical, as a sentence of prose may be rhythmical, but since the melodic constituents come in upon different parts of the measure, one culminating at one moment, another at another, the parts often crossing each other, so that while the mind may be fixed upon one melody which seems to lead, another, which has been coming up from below, strikes in across the field,—the result of all this is that the attention is constantly being dislodged from one tonal centre and shifted to another, and the whole scheme of design seems without form, a fluctuating mass swayed hither and thither without coherent plan. The music does not lack dynamic change or alteration of speed, but these contrasts are often so subtly graded that