The madrigal was carried to Germany by Netherlanders and German students of the Venetians, but it never succeeded in making much headway against the national fondness for the folk-song (_Volkslied_), from which it radically differed. Neither was it seriously valued in France, although here the _chanson_ had long enjoyed great popularity and had furnished the type from which the early Flemish madrigals were evolved. English soil, however, was especially favorable to its development, and it was no sooner transplanted thither from Italy and Flanders than it took deep root and flourished with a luxuriance that did not lose its splendor beside the best works of Rome or Venice. Richard Edwards (1523-1566) and William Byrd (1543-1623), the latter the greatest English composer of the sixteenth century, had both written polyphonic secular songs of the madrigal type that had achieved wide fame, but the national love of part-songs received an extraordinary stimulus from the publication in 1588 of _Musica Transalpina_,[40] a collection of over fifty madrigals selected from the best Flemish and Italian composers of the time and adapted to English words. These were received with such astonishing favor that the madrigal at once leaped into the importance almost of a national institution, fostered by a numerous school of composers who devoted themselves almost wholly to perfecting it. All the best English composers delighted in producing madrigals in countless profusion. Between the years of 1590 and 1630 no less than 2,000 pieces in this form were published, so that at the beginning of the seventeenth century the madrigal stands out as the clearest expression of the contemporary English national taste, the favorite of composers and public alike. The flowering period of the English madrigal was the first two decades of the seventeenth century, when a truly brilliant galaxy of native composers developed characteristics that distinguish it quite clearly from its continental relatives and place it on a secure vantage-ground where it need fear no rival. In delicacy, simplicity, and a delicious naïveté, some of the English madrigals of this period are unapproachable. During the Elizabethan era English church-music reached a high standard, but it sounds restrained and almost perfunctory beside the joyous, fresh, spontaneous flow of these madrigals.