The toccata, prelude, fugue, and variations are the results of the labor of musicians during the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries to invent and improve forms of music which, as independent compositions, might impress the hearer with their organic unity, so to speak, and serve as dignified expression of their own skill and their own ideals of beauty. Of these the prelude alone, with its basis of chord sequences, is wholly a product of the new time. The others rest heavily upon the vocal skill of the past. None of them, however, is perfect. Skill in laying a harmonic groundwork of wide proportions is still to be acquired; and, so far as the harpsichord and clavichord are concerned, a sense for instrumental style and special instrumental effects has to be cultivated much further. We shall have to wait another half-century before that sense has become keen enough to influence development of harpsichord music. IV Meanwhile the growth and relative perfection of another form is to be observed, namely, the suite.[4] This is a conventional group of four short pieces in dance forms and rhythms. A great amount of dance music had been published for the lute in Italy as early as 1502. Of the twenty-one pieces published in the _Parthenia_ more than a hundred years later, five were pavans and ten were galliards. In all these early dance pieces the rhythm is more or less disguised under a heavy polyphonic style; so we may presume that they were not intended to be played in the ballroom, but rather that the short and symmetrical forms of good dance music were regarded by composers as serviceable molds into which to cast their musical inspirations. Indeed, they must have made a strong appeal to composers at a time when they were baffled in their instrumental music by ignorance of the elementary principles of musical structure. The early Italian lute collections already reveal a tendency on the part of composers to group at least two of these dances together. The two chosen are the pavan and the galliard, the one a slow and stately dance in double time, the other a livelier dance in triple time. Often, it is true, these two are not grouped together in the printed collections; but it seems likely that the lutenists of the sixteenth century were fond of such a selection in performance. In 1597 Thomas Morley, an English musician, published in the form of dialogues his ‘Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke.’ In this he treated of dance music at some length, and made special note of the pleasing effect to be got by alternating pavans and galliards.