was reserved for the Germans, also, to develop the sonata form as we know it to-day, to build it up into that wonderful vehicle for free fancy and for the philosophic development of musical ideas. Before introducing the reader to the men of this epoch, who prepared the way for Haydn and Mozart, we are obliged, for a better understanding of their work, to describe briefly the nature and development of that form which serves, so to speak, as a background to their activity. Certain successive epochs in the history of our art have been so dominated by one or another type of music that they might as aptly derive their names from the particular type in fashion as the early Christian era did from plain-chant. Thus the sixteenth century might well be called the age of the madrigal, the early seventeenth the period of accompanied monody, and the late seventeenth the epoch of the suite. As the vogue of any of these forms increases, a chain of conventions and rules invariably grows up which tends first to fix it, then to force it into stereotypes which become the instrument of mediocre pedants. The very rules by which it grows to perfection become the shackles which arrest its expansion. Thus it usually deteriorates almost immediately after it has reached its highest elevation at the hand of genius, unless it gives way to the broadening, liberalizing assaults of iconoclasts, and only in the measure to which it is capable of adapting itself to broader principles is further life vouchsafed to it. It continues then to exist beyond the period which is, so to speak, its own, in a sort of afterglow of glory, less brilliant but infinitely richer in interest, color and all-pervading warmth. All the types above mentioned, from the madrigal down, have continued to exist, in a sense, to our time, and, though our age is obviously as antagonistic to the spirit of the madrigal as it is to that of plain-chant, we might cite modern part-songs partaking of the same spirit which have a far stronger appeal. The modern symphonic suites of a Bizet or a Rimsky-Korsakoff as compared to the orchestral suite of the eighteenth century furnish perhaps the most striking case in point.