Yet it must be granted that the masters of the old French school deserve no small credit for their scientific and practical labors. During the time of their ascendancy the resources of notation were increased, double counterpoint was cultivated, a greater freedom in metre and rhythm was introduced, the several voices became more nearly independent, and an extraordinary degree of attention was paid to the problems involved in mensuration. They failed, however, in reaching a point at which true artistic composition, in the larger sense, begins. 'Of symmetrical arrangement, based upon the lines of a preconceived design, they had no idea. Their highest aspirations extended no farther than the enrichment of a given melody with such harmonies as they were able to improvise at a moment’s notice: whereas composition, properly so called, depends, for its existence, upon the invention--or, at least, upon the selection--of a definite musical idea, which the genius of the composer presents, now in one form, and now in another, until the exhaustive discussion of its various aspects produces a work of art, as consistent, in its integrity, as the conduct of a scholastic thesis, or a dramatic poem.’[89] It was this very quality of design which distinguished the work of the Flemish composers, who, about the middle of the fourteenth century, gained the dominating position among European musicians. II With the decline of the old French school the musical leadership of Europe passed into the hands of the Early Netherlanders, called by some historians the Gallo-Belgian School, which flourished, roughly, from the middle of the fourteenth to the middle of the fifteenth century.