free, wild life who yet had undergone strict musical training in the monasteries of northern France, he is interesting as showing the contrast of theoretical and of actual music and the first efforts to combine the one with the other. * * * * * It is difficult, if not impossible, to say just how much the Troubadours and the Trouvères influenced the development of music. The Troubadours found a footing in Sicily and southern Italy and influenced the growth of the so-called _Ars Nova_, which will be treated in the next chapter. Melodies of the Trouvères were adopted by the Netherland composers as the foundations of their masses. These are definite points at which secular and religious music certainly touched. If, beyond this, the relations between them are vague and hard to trace, the movements of which the Troubadours and the Trouvères are manifestations are none the less of vital significance in the history of music. Through them the undercurrent of real free music, which we may be sure never ceased to flow even when the crushing weight of scholasticism was heaviest, welled to the surface. They represent spontaneous joy and human delight in ages fettered with theology and logic. They represent the real source of music. Those who would believe that the great Italian Renaissance was not primarily a return to classicism but an all-powerful and general awakening of man to the beauty and delight of earth will find in the music of the Troubadours and Trouvères this natural delight expressed. If, as it happened, music was the last to rise up in the freedom of the Renaissance, it was because music got no help in her need of expression from a study of the music of the ancients; music had to build slowly her own means, unaided by precedent and past accomplishment, fed and encouraged only by the natural love of man’s heart to sing, a love which is here attested in the dark ages and to which she finally turned. VI