The way to test any food is to observe its effects on those addicted to it. To study the true workings of music, then, you would not count the pulse of one of those "Oh-I'm-passionately-fond-of-music" maidens who talk all through even dance-music. Nor would you take for your test one of those laymen who are fond of this tune or that, because it reminds them of the first time they heard it--"that night when Sally Perkins sang it while I was out in the moonlit piazza hugging Kitty Gray, now Mrs. van Van,--or was it Bessie Brown? who buried her husband two years ago next Sunday." These are people to whom music is as much a rarity as Nesselrode to a newsboy. The true place, surely, to test the effect of music is in the souls of the people who live in it, breathe it, steep themselves in it, play it,--and what is worse,--work it. To the great musicians themselves, then, we have turned. What could have been better for the purpose than to have made them parade before us in historic mardi-gras? wearing their hearts on their sleeves, or in their letters, their music, their lives, as they trooped forth endlessly from the tomes of Burney, Hawkins, Fétis, Grove, Riemann, and from their biographies and memoirs innumerable? A motley crew they have formed, and you perhaps have been able to find a unity, if not of purpose, at least of result, in the music they have made, and the music that has made them. Let them pass again, only this time as soldiers go by at a review--the second time at the double-quick. Here they come--watch them well. Leading the rout are those stately or capering figures, who, from being the great virtuosi of their time, were finally idolised into gods in the Golden Age, when musical critics had no columns to perpetuate their iconoclasms in. Mark him with the stately stride--Apollo, smiting his lyre with a majesty hardly supported by the seven small notes he could get out of it. The gossips said he loved Daphne, and madly withal, but she took to a tree.--No, let the gods pass as they will. It is with men we deal, not gods. Note especially the cluster of those wonderful musickers, who, at the end of the Middle Age, went from Flanders and thereabouts, into Italy and all around Europe, weaving their Flemish counterpoint like a net all over the world of music. They seem all to have been marrying men, some of them super-romantical, others as stodgily domestic and workaday as any village blacksmith. There is Marc Houtermann, called the Prince of Musicians. He lived at Brussels, and died there aged forty, and the same year he was followed to his grave by his musically named Joanna Gavadia, who knew music well, and who, let us still hope, died of a broken heart. Cipriano de Rore, De Croes, and Jacques Buus were all married men, and begot hostages to fortune. Philippe de Monte may or may not have married; we only know that a pupil of his wrote him a Latin poem forty-six lines long, and we can only trust that he did not marry her.