Palestrina wrote in all ninety-three masses for four, five, six, and eight voices, many of them of surpassing beauty, but only a comparatively few are sung outside the Sistine Chapel. The six-part _Assumpta est Maria_, composed in 1585 for the Papal Choir, is accounted by many critics to be even more beautiful than the celebrated _Missa Papæ Marcelli_. It possesses all the fine qualities of the latter and is certainly its equal. The _Missa Brevis_[36] was composed upon subjects taken from the plain-song melody _Audi filia_, upon which Goudimel had written a fine mass of earlier date. The mass _L’homme armé_ is one of the very few of his church compositions into which he introduced secular melodies. It is quite possible that he took this means of demonstrating that he could excel the Netherlanders on their own ground, for it is apparently conceived throughout in the Netherland style and is tremendously difficult and elaborate. Among the most superb of his church compositions must be named the motets, of which 179 for from four to twelve voices appear in the complete critical edition published by Breitkopf & Haertel in 33 volumes. Some of these are as unapproachable in their beauty as are the masses which gave Palestrina his title of _Musicæ Princeps_. Among the finest may be mentioned _Peccantem me quotidie_, filled with an indescribable sweetness and tenderness of feeling, and _Super flumina Babylonis_, written soon after the death of his wife Lucrezia, in which can be detected the expression of the pathetic grief of ‘the heart-broken composer mourning by the banks of the Tiber’ for his lost wife. His other church compositions include 45 Hymns for the whole year, 68 Offertories, and a large number of Lamentations, Magnificats, Vesper-psalms, and Litanies. His setting of the _Stabat Mater_, for which Dr. Burney had a boundless admiration, is one of the most effective in existence and one of his most celebrated works. The fine _Improperia_, which are still among the greatest treasures of the Papal Choir, probably reflect the experiences of his inner life during the anxious period following his dismissal from the Papal Choir by Paul IV in 1555, when physical and mental ills attacked the over-sensitive master.