=France.= French musical art owes the stability of her early dramatic growth to three eminent composers: Lulli, Rameau, Gluck; and the first and the last of these were foreigners. Moreover into their hands was entrusted the moulding of French orchestration, for French orchestral music was not destined to disengage itself from bondage to the drama and assert itself as a clearly defined indigenous product until the nineteenth century. A sharp line of demarcation must be drawn between each respective career of these three pillars of the nascent stage. For Lulli had appropriated to himself all the glory attendant upon the Royal Opera, not alone as the director but as composer as well. Not until after his death did it become possible for others to reap the benefits of experience in hearing their own works produced, in consequence of which, latent talent had had no chance to expand. And the interim between Lulli and Rameau is signalized as a period of reaction during which the efforts of even the most prominent writers were but a pale reflection of those of their illustrious master. Three composers, born in the second half of the seventeenth century, namely Campra, Destouches, Mouret, were the immediate successors of Lulli, and dedicated their services, such as they were, to the conservation of his ideals. Of these three men, Campra is popularly called the link between Lulli and Rameau. Campra possessed genuinely dramatic instincts, exercised his talents along sacred lines as well as secular, and revealed certain traits of independence and originality in that he dared to depart from Lulli's somewhat austere style by emphasizing the necessity for augmenting rhythmic effects, which was distinctly beneficial in the development of orchestration. It is interesting to note that he was the first Frenchman to employ the _cor de chasse_ in opera, although Lulli introduced it into some of his ballets. The contributions of Destouches were of small intrinsic value other than the fact that the chivalrous surroundings of his earlier career as an officer had nurtured his natural temperament for the graceful and refined. And so with this æsthetic touch of a composer otherwise lacking in musical education, he added his mite to the development of daintiness in instrumentation, such as the use of two piccolo flutes in thirds in one of his ballets, and other minor though interesting details. Of Mouret's operas little can be said; but he deserves honorable mention for his labors as a conductor of the "Concerts spirituels," which, as the name implies, had been founded in 1725 to occupy the _interregna_ whenever the opera houses were closed for religious reasons. Consequently, his name is rightfully connected with the evolution of the concert orchestra, for the "Concerts spirituels" exercised a discriminating influence at a critical time in French musical history, especially since subsequently, about the date of Beethoven's birth, it was