But my brief record, necessarily dry and bald, of a momentous change in the teaching of the world would be incomplete without one word on the glorious instrument--the voice, so to speak--of these masters of a new art, the organ. The first organ known in Western Europe traditionally was sent to Pepin in France by the Emperor of Constantinople in 759, but Aldhelm, Bishop of Sherborne, in his poem on Virginity, some half a century earlier, apparently describes what appears to have been the organ. Elphege, Abbot of Winchester in the tenth century, is said to have caused a very large organ to be constructed; but, with this solitary exception, all the mediæval organs seem to have been small and comparatively unimportant instruments. The oldest organ-cases preserved do not date back further than the last years of the fifteenth century, and these by the side of modern organs are insignificant in size. Viollet le Duc, in his great work, gives us a picture of the Perpignan organ, one of the earliest (early in the sixteenth century). From this date the size rapidly increased. In the "Rites of Durham," where a great mediæval church is described at the period of the Dissolution (1530-40), there were three organs in use in the abbey church, the principal one being only used at "principall Feasts," the pipes being "very faire and partly gilded." "Only two organs in England," says the "Rites," "of the same makinge, one in Yorke and another in Paules." [Illustration: LISTENERS AT THE THREE-CHOIR FESTIVAL.] The most magnificent organ-case in Europe is the one in St. Janskirk at Bois le Duc, and, like the vast majority of the great organ-cases, is Renaissance in style. Viollet le Duc sums up the question in the following sentence:-- "It does not appear that great organs were in use before the fifteenth century, and it was only towards the close of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries that the idea of building organs of dimensions hitherto unknown was first conceived." The organ, as we now know it, was born among us at the same date when architecture died. Like the music of the Middle Ages, in the days when these vast and peerless buildings arose, it is true the organ was not unknown; but, like mediæval music, it was a small, poor thing compared with the stupendous instrument we know and love. There was no great organ before the last years of the fifteenth century, when the Tudors reigned. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed its development, and acknowledged its surpassing grandeur, and recognised its fitness as one of the chief handmaids of the new great art.