It is true of these songs (as was not true of earlier folk-music) that the composers are known and remembered. Indeed, the songs are promptly printed and circulated. But the composers are nevertheless true sons of the people. They have little knowledge of letters and musical laws; they compose from the heart and from the instinct for fitness. The music of such composers can justly be classed as folk-music, since it is utterly in the popular spirit and receives the _visé_ of the masses. It is more unfortunate that in Naples a phonograph firm has undertaken to make commercial capital out of the Fair of Piedegrotta, and every year takes records of the successful songs, which it circulates all over Europe. Under such conditions the composers must necessarily soon lose the celebrated ‘folk simplicity,’ if they have not lost it already. It is fair to say that in Italy folk-music is still very much alive. All that is new in life is celebrated by these folk-poets. The famous ‘Funicula,’ a modern Italian folk-song _par excellence_, was made to celebrate the funicular or inclined railroad in the days when this was a novelty. There is a well-known Neapolitan song in honor of the telephone, and current events, such as the Turkish war, receive generous attention. In many other countries the _growth_ of folk-song has all but ceased, though the songs of former times are sung with almost as much zest as ever. But these songs (including most of those familiar to us) are usually not of great age. At least they have generally been remade in more up-to-date form and do not plainly show evidences of their age. Generally speaking, we may be sure that any folk-song in the common major scale is to be dated within the last two hundred years. It may have been founded on an older song, but its modern changes have been such as to give it a totally new flavor. This is not to say that all old songs which remain living in the hearts of the people become changed according to musical fashions. Those which have a strong enough traditional hold may keep their ancient form after Debussy has been forgotten. Thus many an English folk-song, startling and inspiriting in its originality, is in a modal scale--with a minor that is not commonly in use to-day, or else a shifting between one tonic and another which carries us clearly back into the days when tonality was not yet felt in scales. Yet these songs were not committed to paper in Henry VIII’s or Queen Elizabeth’s time, when they attained their present form. They have mostly been discovered by earnest searching only within the last ten years. They lived, in unsophisticated, out-of-the-way places, in their ancient form.