The conclusion of _The Merchant of Venice_ brings us to the threshold of a term in Shakespeare's life instinct with high-pitched gaiety and gladness. In this, his brightest period, he fervently celebrates strength and wisdom in man, intellect and wit in woman; and these most brilliant years of his life are also the most musical. His poetry, his whole existence, seem now to be given over to music, to harmony. He had been early familiar with the art of music, and must have heard much music in his youth.[1] Even in his earliest plays, such as _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_, we find a considerable insight into musical technique, as in the conversation between Julia and Lucetta (i. 2). He must often have heard the Queen's choir, and the choirs maintained by noble lords and ladies, like that which Portia has in her palace. And he no doubt heard much music performed in private. The English were in his day, what they have never been since, a musical people. It was the Puritans who cast out music from the daily life of England. The spinet was the favourite instrument of the time. Spinets stood in the barbers' shops, for the use of customers waiting their turn. Elizabeth herself played on the spinet and the lute. In his Sonnet cxxviii., addressed to the lady whom he caressingly calls "my music," Shakespeare has described himself as standing beside his mistress's spinet and envying the keys which could kiss her fingers. In all probability he was personally acquainted with John Dowland, the chief English musician of the time, although the poem in which he is named, published as Shakespeare's in _The Passionate Pilgrim_, is not by him, but by Richard Barnfield. In _The Taming of the Shrew_ (iii. I); written just before _The Merchant of Venice_, he had utilised his knowledge of singing and lute-playing in a scene of gay comedy. "The cause why music was ordained," says Lucentio-- "Was it not to refresh the mind of man, After his studies, or his usual pain?" Its influence upon mental disease was also known to Shakespeare, and noted both in _King Lear_ and in _The Tempest_. But here, in _The Merchant of Venice_, where music is wedded to moonlight, his praise of it takes a higher flight:-- "How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! Here we will sit, and let the sounds of music Creep in our ears: soft stillness, and the night, Become the touches of sweet harmony." And Shakespeare, who never mentions church music, which seems to have had no message for his soul, here makes the usually unimpassioned Lorenzo launch out into genuine Renaissance rhapsodies upon the music of the spheres:--