In all this historical study of the earlier volumes of 'The Art of Music’ the reader will be primarily in quest of information, his interest will be that of the scientist in facts. Even here, however, he will soon find himself discriminating the good from the bad, or from the less good, setting up standards of comparison, in a word, mingling with his purely scientific interest in facts an artistic interest in values. In all periods he will find the great man distinguished from the little by nobility, depth, and variety of thought, and by purity of style. In all ages he will discover hosts of mediocrities for one genius. He will realize that there were as many routinists in the polyphonic school, as many dry-as-dusts in the classic, as many sentimentalists in the romantic, as there are uninspired scene-painters among the programmists. He will remark what may be called the double paradox of art: first, that cheap decorativeness, empty display of merely technical skill, 'splurge’ of all sorts, while often making music popular in its own day, has always killed it early for posterity, as for example in the case of the over-ornamented arias of Italian opera or the equally over-ornamented piano pieces of Thalberg and other early nineteenth century pianists; second, that simplicity, directness, sincerity are always at first ignored or misunderstood, and only gradually take the supreme place which belongs to them, as we see in studying such otherwise dissimilar artists as Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner, Brahms, Franck. Such observations open up the path to a true, independent, and unconventional estimate of artistic values, to the development of real taste.