In the sixteenth century the Flemish writers, headed by Josquin des Prés, made great moves onward, and gained the leading position in musical Europe by earnest work and pure and noble endeavours. They chose passages from the Gospels and the Book of Canticles for their motetts, and imbued them with characteristic individuality. At the same period the Lamentations of Jeremiah were largely drawn upon for subjects. In this and the fifteenth centuries we find a large collection of funeral motetts, named nœniæ, very reverent and beautiful. One by Josquin des Prés, founded on plain chant, and written in memory of his friend Okenheim (who was also his master), is very fine. Petrucci, the father of type music printing, gave most of the earliest nœniæ to the world, many of which may be seen in the British Museum. In the middle of the sixteenth century motetts were, perhaps, influenced for good by the wonderful progress of the madrigal, but each part was written with a different text, and this confusion became an abuse. However, towards the latter part of the century that bright genius, Palestrina, proved himself to be as great a writer of motetts as he was of masses. He composed over three hundred to our knowledge, and in all probability there are more than that which have been lost. Cotemporary with this great light we find, in Italy, Morales, Anesio, Luca Marenzio, and, above all, Vittoria, who was almost as great a motett composer as Palestrina himself; in the Netherlands, Orlando di Lasso; in Venice, Willaert, and, later, Croce and the two Gabrielis. Our English writers, Tallis and Byrd, whom we shall refer to again immediately, wrote as fine motetts as any produced by the foreign schools, under the title, “Cantiones Sacræ.” Dr. Tye, Dr. Fairfax, and others also added specimens to the English list. These motetts, as we shall see, became (after the Reformation) full anthems, which were in musical form motetts, but were set to English words. In some cases the English words are translations from the Latin. It is curious to find that Orlando Gibbons, in the seventeenth century, writing anthems for the church, christened his secular part-music “Madrigals and Motets,” thereby reverting to the old use of the term in connection with secular words only. In the seventeenth century the motett still flourished in the Roman Church, but not for long, according to its old form. Mr. Rockstro attributes the downfall of the old motett to the invention, by Monteverde, of dominant unprepared dissonances, which “sapped the foundation of the Polyphonic School.”