For nearly a century, then, we find the lyric drama continuing to utilize the materials of the sacra rappresentazione as adapted to secular purposes by Poliziano, but with the natural results of the improvement in artistic device in music. It is not necessary here to enter into a detailed account of the growth of musical expression. Every student of the history of the art knows that many centuries were required to build up a technical praxis sufficient to enable composers to shape compositions in such a large form as the Roman Catholic mass. When the basic laws of contrapuntal technic had been codified, Josquin des Pres led the way to the production of music possessing a beauty purely musical. Then followed the next logical step, namely, the attempt to imitate externals. Such pieces as Jannequin's "Chant des Oiseaux" and Gombert's "Chasse du Lievre" are examples of what was achieved in this direction. Finally, Palestrina demonstrated the scope of polyphonic music in the expression of religious emotions at times bordering upon the dramatic in their poignancy. We cannot well doubt that the Italians of the late sixteenth century felt the failure of their secular music to meet the demands of secular poetry as religious music was meeting those of the canticles of the church. The festal entertainments which had graced the marriages of princes had most of the machinery of opera, but they lacked the vital principle. They failed to become living art entities solely because they wanted the medium for the adequate publication of individuality. They made their march of a century on the very verge of the promised land, but they had to lose themselves in the bewitching wilderness of the madrigal drama before they found their Moses. It was the gradual growth of skill in musical expression that brought the way into sight, and that growth had to be effected by natural and logical processes, not by the discovery or by the world-moving genius of any one composer. The Doric architecture of the frottola had to be developed into the Italian Renaissance style of the madrigal by the ripening of the craft of composers in adapting the music of ecclesiastical polyphony to the communication of worldly thought. Then the Renaissance style had to lose itself in the baroque struggles of the final period of the madrigal drama--struggles of artistic impulse against an impossible style of structure and the uncultivated taste of the auditors. Then and then only was the time for revolt and the revolt came.