The _Parthenia_ was printed in 1611. But an old manuscript collection, the Mulliner Collection, contains music that can hardly be later than 1565. The activity of the English composers, therefore, during the years between 1565 and 1611 produced an extraordinary amount of music designed expressly for the virginal or harpsichord. Among the composers three stand out prominently: John Bull, William Byrd, and Orlando Gibbons; Byrd by reason of his fine artistic sense, Bull by his instinct for instrumental effect. Indeed, Bull, though a great organist, was a virtuoso for the harpsichord quite as remarkable in a limited sphere as Liszt was to be in a much broader one. In much of his virginal music there is a variety of figuration far more in keeping with the peculiar nature of the instrument for which it was written than that which is to be found in the work of his successors of any land, nearly to the time of Domenico Scarlatti. Of all forms of musical structure, the most frequently employed in the works which make up these collections is the variation form. It is to be understood, of course, that these variations are not the variations of Bach, of Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms. These great masters subjected their chosen themes to the influences of diverse moods, as it were, from which the themes took on new rhythm, new form, even new harmony. They were born with a great instrumental technique to hand, from which to select a thousand devices wherewith to adorn and color their themes. Byrd, Bull, and Gibbons, for all their conspicuous genius, could not expand to great proportion the art of writing for domestic keyboard instruments. It was still in a weak infancy. Nor was the emotional power of music at all appreciated at that time, nor the treatment of the same theme as the expression of various emotions in turn likely to occur to the mind of the most gifted of musicians. The variation form, then, was merely a means to spin out a piece of considerable length, which should yet have consistency and coherence. The theme itself was scarcely if at all altered in its various repetitions, but went on over and over again, while the composer added above it an ever more complicated or a more animated counterpoint. The counterpoint was for the most part conjunct; that is to say, that it progressed by short steps, not by skips. Scales are therefore far more frequent than arpeggios. The shade of the old vocal art is deep even over these composers. John Bull alone is, as we have said, at times astonishingly modern. His brilliant imagination devised arpeggio figures which today have by no means lost their effectiveness, and he could split up the theme itself into a series of lively, skipping figures.