The dissipation of the halo of special beatification which certain early worshipers of Palestrina have attempted to throw about the Mass of Pope Marcellus has in no wise dimmed its glory. It is not unworthy of the renown which it has so dubiously acquired. Although many times equalled by its author, he never surpassed it, and few will be inclined to dispute the distinction it has always claimed as the most perfect product of mediaeval musical art. Its style was not new; it does not mark the beginning of a new era, as certain writers but slightly versed in music history have supposed, but the culmination of an old one. It is essentially in the manner of the Netherland school, which the myth-makers would represent as condemned by the Council of Trent. Josquin des Prés, Orlandus Lassus, Goudimel, and many others had written music in the same style, just as chaste and subdued, with the same ideal in mind, and almost as perfectly beautiful. It is not a simple work, letting the text stand forth in clear and obvious relief, as the legend would require. It is a masterpiece of construction, abounding in technical subtleties, differing from the purest work of the Netherlanders only in being even more delicately tinted and sweet in melody than the best of them could attain. It was in the quality of melodious grace that Palestrina soared above his Netherland masters. Melody, as we know, is the peculiar endowment of the Italians, and Palestrina, a typical son of Italy, crowned the Netherland science with an ethereal grace of movement which completed once for all the four hundred years’ striving of contrapuntal art, and made it stand forth among the artistic creations of the Middle Age perhaps the most divinely radiant of them all.