About 1500 the triad was recognized as a musical factor of importance and close upon this recognition came the discovery of modal harmony. Chord progressions, groups of closely-knit harmonies, appropriate to the church mode employed, now became common and in the relation of this new factor to musical expression is to be found the basis of distinction between secular and sacred music, a distinction which rapidly grew more marked as the harmonic sense unfolded and developed. From Josquin’s time secular music strove after the representation of specific moods of feeling suggested by the words, in which representation the new element of harmony was summoned to give warmth and color and dramatic significance, while sacred music sought to express only the general mood of the text, representing an unvariable and fixed aspiration, with little or no attempt at detailed delineation. IV The last great Netherlander, and indeed the greatest of them all, was Orlandus Lassus or Orlando di Lasso (1532-1594), who spent nearly the whole of the best creative period of his life outside the boundaries of his native land in Munich in the service of the art-loving Duke Albert V and his son Duke William of Bavaria. Next to Palestrina the greatest genius of the sixteenth century, he left a deep impress on the development of Germanic art. Though not so ideal in purely ritual-music as his great contemporary, he displayed a greater fertility, a wider sympathy, and a warmer human feeling. Proske’s estimate of him is noteworthy: ‘Lassus is a universal genius.... No one resembles so closely the great Handel, and, as in the latter, the German, Italian, and English genius of the eighteenth century were found blended, so in Lassus the entire glory of contemporary Germanic and Latin art was commingled in a single mighty personality.’ (_Musica Divina_, Vol. I, p. 52.)