Historically the songs of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven are of less importance than those of the composers just named. Haydn’s are predominantly instrumental in character. Mozart was much more of a poet for the voice, and has to his credit at least one song, ‘The Violet,’ a true _durchkomponiertes Lied_, which can take its place beside the best in German song literature. Beethoven’s songs are often no more than musical routine. His early ‘Adelaide,’ a sentimental scena in the Italian style, is his best known, but his setting to Gellert’s ‘The Heavens Declare the Glory of the Eternal’ is by far the finest. Except that it is a little stiff in its grandeur it would be one of the noblest of German songs. Yet Beethoven’s place in the history of song rests chiefly upon the fact that he was one of the first to compose a true song cycle having poetical and musical unity. In some ways he anticipated Schumann’s practises. II With Schubert the _Lied_ appears, so to speak, ready made. After his early years there is no more development toward the _Lied_; there is only development _of_ the _Lied_. In his eighteenth year Schubert composed a song which is practically flawless (‘The Erlking’) and continued thereafter producing at a mighty pace, sometimes nodding, like Homer, and ever and again dashing off something which is matchless. In all he composed some six hundred and fifty songs. Many of them are mediocre, as is inevitable with one who composes in such great quantity. Many others, like the beautiful _Todesmusik_, are uneven, passages of highest beauty alternating with vapid stretches such as any singing teacher might have composed. He wrote as many as six or seven songs between breakfast and dinner, beginning the new one the instant he had finished the old. He sometimes sold them at twenty cents apiece (when he could sell them at all). It is easy to say that he should have composed less and revised more, but it does not appear that it cost him any more labor to compose a great song than a mediocre one. On the whole, it seems that Schubert measured his powers justly in depending on the first inspiration. At the same time, it has been established that he was not willfully careless with his songs--not, at any rate, with the ones he believed in. A number were revised and copied three and four times. But generally his first inspiration, whether it was good or bad, was allowed to stand.