the same manner--sometimes as many as eight or ten composers for one work. The songs never appeared as organic parts of the action and hence offer no analogy to the arias of true opera, but they were usually made vaguely appropriate to the dramatic situation and were introduced in such a way as not to seem out of place. Among the host of these melodies which have come down to us there are indeed many which are fresh and attractive. But the great majority have the cheapness of the street without its abundant life. And they nearly always have a strain of the extreme sentimentality which has remained a blot on English song literature until recent times. On the whole, if the ballad operas delivered England from the pompous inanities of the Italian craze, they also seduced English taste from the exquisite manner of Purcell. The better part of musical England turned to the noble oratorios of Handel and against his thundering chords all minor lyric strains were fruitless. The song writers of eighteenth-century England are a depressing crew. Henry Carey (1685-1743), to whom the melody of ‘God Save the King’ has been attributed, was a fruitful writer of ballad operas, though he is nowadays best known by ‘Sally in Our Alley,’ a tune which is the essence of awkwardness--a tune, in short, which could have happened nowhere but in eighteenth-century England. Thomas Arne (1710-78) was much more of a musician and a scholar, but also much of a pedant. Even such a dainty song as ‘Where the Bee Sucks’ is marred by its awkward overlaying of _fiorituri_. The song by which Arne is best known, ‘Rule Britannia,’ is indeed a stirring melody; but the fact that a man of Arne’s standing could write such a tune to the given words and that England could accept the two as belonging together proves to what a depth the country had sunk in musical matters. We need only quote the first line: [Illustration: Music score] When Britain first at Heav’n’s command Wagner said that this phrase contained the whole spirit of the English people. But what about the words and that ridiculous ‘fir-r-r-r-rst?’ Samuel Arnold (1740-1802), Charles Dibdin (1745-1814), James Hook (1746-1827), and John Davy (1764-1824) need only be mentioned and forgotten. Henry Bishop (1788-1855) was a man of more artistic sense and a composer of graceful and emotional melody, but without his operas he would scarcely be remembered. The tradition of awkward and sentimental melody which these men established or maintained continued to disgrace English song until the close of the nineteenth century and even to-day in the half-conscious English popular ballad we seem to hear the debased strains of the ballad opera. IV