been fully mastered, and composers had learned to lead their parts with the confidence with which the engraver traces his lines to shape them into designs of beauty. The singular perfection of the work of Palestrina has served to direct the slight attention which the world now gives to the music of the sixteenth century almost exclusively to him; yet he was but one master among a goodly number whose productions are but slightly inferior to his,—_primus inter pares_. Orlandus Lassus in Munich, Willaert, and the two Gabrielis, Andrea and Giovanni, and Croce in Venice, the Naninis, Vittoria, and the Anerios in Rome, Tallis in England, are names which do not pale when placed beside that of the “prince of music.” Venice, particularly, was a worthy rival of Rome in the sphere of church song. The catalogue of her musicians who flourished in the sixteenth and early part of the seventeenth centuries contains the names of men who were truly sovereigns in their art, not inferior to Palestrina in science, compensating for a comparative lack of the super-refined delicacy and tremulous pathos which distinguished the Romans by a larger emphasis upon contrast, color variety, and characteristic expression. It was as though the splendors of Venetian painting had been emulated, although in reduced shades, by these masters of Venetian music. In admitting into their works contrivances for effect which anticipated a coming revolution in musical art, the Venetians, rather than the Romans, form the connecting link between mediaeval and modern religious music. In the Venetian school we find triumphing over the ineffable calmness and remote impersonality of the Romans a more individual quality—a strain almost of passion and stress, and a far greater sonority and pomp. Chromatic changes, at first irregular and unsystematized, come gradually into use as a means of attaining greater intensity; dissonances become more pronounced, foreshadowing the change of key system with all its consequences. The contrapuntal leading of parts, in whose cunning labyrinths the expression of feeling through melody strove to lose itself, tended under the different ideal cherished by the Venetians to condense into more massive harmonies, with bolder outlines and melody rising into more obvious relief. As far back as the early decades of the sixteenth century Venice had begun to loosen the bands of mediaeval choral law, and by a freer use of dissonances to prepare the ear for a new order of perceptions. The unprecedented importance given to the organ by the Venetian church composers, and the appearance of the beginnings of an independent organ style, also contributed strongly to the furtherance of the new tendencies. In this broader outlook, more individual stamp, and more self-conscious aim toward brilliancy the music of Venice simply shared those impulses that manifested themselves in the gorgeous canvases of her great painters and in the regal splendors of her public spectacles.