In England the curtain of the seventeenth century rose on a country that as yet knew not cropped heads nor Geneva cloaks nor steeple-crowned hats nor the snuffling drone of Hop-on-High-Bomby mournfully mouthing the sinfulness of the flesh and the menace of the wrath to come. England still deserved its old-time appellation of 'merrie.' It still ate and drank, sang and swore, bussed and wantoned blithely, lustily, as befitted a country with a full purse, a sound constitution, and a healthy indifference to the disturbing subtleties of theology and metaphysics. It was a robust, Falstaffian England, still unregenerate, still addicted to sack and loose company, but with a mind as clearly keen as a Sheffield blade and a heart as soft and impressionable as its own Devonshire butter--'pitiful-hearted butter that melted at the sweet tale of the sun.' In short, a normal, vigorous, able-bodied, human country, not yet soured by the virus of an acidulated Puritanism, nor devitalized by the distemper of a cultivated licentiousness; a country in whose fertile soil the seeds of art might well germinate and flourish apace. And, as a matter of fact, English music, like English drama and poetry, was then approaching the culmination of its golden age. In Italy, Palestrina had just died; Peri and Monteverdi were shaping the beginnings of opera; the madrigal, the mystery, the morality and the masque were the prevailing media of secular musico-literary expression, while popular instrumental music was represented by Pavans, Galliards, Allmains, Courantes, and other courtly-sounding forms. The stern, strict god of polyphony was already stooping to flirt with the light and wayward muse of the people, making the first tentative advances toward a union from which was destined to spring a seductively human art. Never since has England stood so high musically among the nations of Europe. Never since has she produced composers who so closely rivalled the greatest of their contemporaries. There was William Byrd 'a Father of Musicke,' as the Cheque-book of the Chapel Royal has it--one of the most learned contrapuntists of his time and unequalled by any of his contemporaries in compositions for the virginals. There was John Dowland, 'whose heavenly touch upon the lute doth ravish human sense.' There was Orlando Gibbons, one of the greatest composers of his period, who was then in the beginning of his distinguished career. These, and many other English composers of scarcely lesser note, were as highly honored abroad as they were at home. Their influence on the development of German music has been admitted even by German critics.[3] In England the madrigal flourished then as it did nowhere else in Europe and reached a degree of perfection hitherto unattained even by the best madrigalists of Italy and the Netherlands. What Peri and Monteverdi were doing successfully in Italy in the pseudo-Grecian music-drama, the English were attempting