the creation of popular theatrical types deserved to be particularly noticed. It is as though the Italian nation at this epoch, suffocated by Spanish etiquette and poisoned by Jesuitical hypocrisy, sought to expand healthy lungs in free spaces of open air, indulging in dialectical niceties and immortalizing street jokes by the genius of masked comedy." We shall perceive, then, in the productions of some representative masters of the madrigal drama in the latter half of the sixteenth century, an expression of this Italian eagerness to abandon even the external attitude of serious contemplation, which the spectacular delights of the intermezzi and the serious lyric drama had made at least tolerable, and to turn to the uses of pure amusement the materials of a clearly defined form of art. We shall find the dramatization of the chatter of the street and the apparition of types familiar to the farcical comedies and operas bouffes of later days. In the washerwomen of Striggio we are not far from _Madame Angot_, and some of the personages whom Vecchi humorously treated in his "Amfiparnaso" are treading the stage of to-day. In these madrigal dramas, as we shall see, the attempts to overcome the musical unsuitability of polyphonic music to the purposes of dramatic dialogue led composers further and further from the truth which had stood at the elbows of Poliziano's contemporaries and immediate successors. Musicians went forward with the madrigal till they found themselves in Vecchi's day confronted with a genuine _reductio ad absurdum_. It was only at this time that the experiments of the Florentines uncovered the profound musical law that the true dramatic dialogue is to be carried on by single-voiced melodies resting on a basis of chord harmony. In the meantime, we must delay our approach to the golden era of the madrigal drama (when indeed it faced that _reductio_) to look for a moment at the representative work of a Mantuan master of the lyric comedy. Alessandro Striggio, born in Mantua, about 1535, died in the same city in 1587, was for a time in the service of Cosimo, but for at least fifteen years of his life was known simply as a "gentleman of Mantua." Striggio was one of the most active and talented of the composers of his time, and his creations are found in both religious and secular fields. He utilized instruments freely in connection with voices and his works give an excellent insight into the general condition of vocal composition in Italy in his day. He became prominent as one of the early composers of intermezzi and he was employed also to write church music for wedding festivals. One of his motets calls for an orchestra of eight trombones, eight violas, eight large flutes, a spinet and a large lute. Without doubt his most significant work in the domain of the lyric drama was "Il Calamento delle Donne al Bucato," published at Florence in 1584.