Any theme, from the ancient plain-song or from the treasure of folk-music, was suitable to serve as a ‘ground’ to these variations, or divisions, as they were called. One comes across delightful old dance-tunes and songs popular in that day. These in themselves are full of the charm of English melody, but when harnessed, as it were, to the slow-moving counterpoint of the variation style, with its archaic harmony and lifeless rhythm, they are robbed of their spirit and their life. We have saved to us again a dead music. Most lifeless of all, and almost laughably pompous in their rigor, are the variations on the first six notes of the scale, the so-called _Fantasias on ut re mi fa sol la_. Every composer tried a hand at this sort of composition. The six notes usually marched up and down the scale, with no intermission. A great deal of modulation was attempted. Sometimes the formula was gone through upon the successive notes of the scale. It was set upon its way in various rhythms, sometimes in long, steady notes, again in rapid notes, yet again in dotted rhythms. At the best the result was a display of some cleverness on the part of the composer, a bit of daring in chromatic alterations, some novelty in combinations of rhythms. It can hardly be supposed that they expressed any æsthetic aspiration. They stand in relation to the development of pianoforte music only as technical exercises of a sort. The same may be said in some instances of the variations upon songs, but is not in the main true. Here is distinctly a groping toward beauty, largely in the dark, to be sure, but tending, on the one hand, toward the development of a fitness of style and, on the other, of a broad and varied form, the noble possibilities of which have become manifest through the genius of all the great instrumental composers since the time of Bach. The influence of these gifted Englishmen and their extraordinary work upon the development of harpsichord music in general was probably relatively slight. A piece by Sweelinck, the famous Dutch organist, is in the Fitzwilliam collection; a fact which points to the intimacy between Holland and England in matters musical. The presence of famous English organists in Holland throughout the first half of the seventeenth century points in the same direction. But the course of harpsichord music in Holland and Germany was, down to the time of Emanuel Bach, guided by organ music. Inasmuch as perhaps the most remarkable feature of this English virginal music is the occasional flashes of instrumental skill and of intuition for harpsichordal effects from the pen of John Bull, and as these stirred to no emulation in Germany, the effect of the English virginal music as such upon the history of the special art may be set down as practically negligible. The famous collections endure, quite like Purcell’s music a whole century later, as an isolated monument of a sudden national development.