Such a gathering as the present, I repeat, is an inspiring one, for it tells me that if one great art dies, He who loves us and has redeemed us at so great a price, gives His children something in its place. Now it is strange that amidst all the gorgeous and striking ceremonial of the mediæval services, with their wealth of colour and ornament, with all their touching and elaborate symbolism, music, as it is now understood, was unknown and comparatively neglected. In the noblest cathedral of the Middle Ages, in the stateliest Benedictine or Cistercian abbey, while the eye was filled with sights of solemnity and beauty, each sight containing its special and peculiar teaching, the ear was comparatively uncared for. Strangely monotonous and even harsh would chaunt and psalm and hymn, as rendered in the mighty abbeys of Westminster, Durham, or Gloucester in the days of the great Plantagenets, of the White Rose or Red Rose kings, sound to the musically trained ears of the worshippers of the second half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, music as a great science was unknown in pre-Reformation times. The most complete anthem-book may be searched through by the curious scholar, but scarcely a musical composer of any note will be found in these collections of a date earlier than the reign of Queen Elizabeth. It would seem as though, when architecture ceased in the sixteenth century to be a living craft, a new art was discovered and worked at by men. A new art! I say these words, strange to some, with emphasis. One who has indeed a right to speak of music[1] thus voices my assertion. While telling us that certain grand forms of music loom out of the darkness of the earlier centuries of our era, the famous musician to whom I refer adds that little of what we understand of music existed before the later years of the fifteenth century. It was no mere renaissance, for that which had never been born could not be born again. [1] Professor Hullah, in his "Lectures on the History of Modern Music," delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, published 1884. See, too, Professor Hullah's Royal Institution Lecture on the Transition Period of Musical History (1876). In case some should think that too strong expressions are here used, it may be well to quote some of Professor Hullah's own words, which he used in the above-mentioned lecture at the Royal Institution:--"Music is a new art.... What we now call music ... what answers to our definition of music, has come into being only within comparatively few years; almost within the memory of men living." "I should say that in the scholastic music there was no art, and in the popular music no science; whence it is that the former has ceased to please, and the latter has for the most part perished utterly."