finally the angel Gabriel came and sat at the feet of the body and played on the flageolet a melody so ravishing that the soul straightway entered in at the mouth of the body, and Adam arose a perfect man. What a deep and beautiful commentary do these stories make on the mysterious reality of music and on the mysterious growth of man, when we think that they were invented ages before the existence of any musical combinations which would sensibly affect the emotions of a modern hearer!

The mention of the music which Shakspere did not hear now leads us quite naturally to the consideration of that which he did hear, and I shall devote my next lecture to that very interesting subject. I shall then explain the two general kinds of music in Shakspere's time, to wit, extempore discant and pricksong; I shall then take up in detail the sort of church music with Shakspere's contemporaries were accustomed to hear, both the formal canons of the Church and the simpler psalms of the Puritans; I shall then consider the sorts of secular music which Shakspere was accustomed to hear, particularly the madrigal, the catch, and the ballad, on the vocal side, and the dance-tunes on the instrumental side, particularly the galliard, the passamezzo or paspy, the coranto, the morrice-dance, and the pavan; I shall next present some account of the great English musicians of Shakspere's time, who were in various ways very interesting men and ought to be better known to us than they are. I hope to be able to give you some actual reproductions of Shaksperian music in illustration of these matters; for this purpose have selected a very pretty canon of old John Taverner's for five voices, which I found in the Peabody Library; also a part-song by John Milton, father of the poet, who was a good musician. Then I have a madrigal of Shakspere's time, and I think I shall be able to find an old

I

catch such as the jolly Sir Toby roared out with his companions in Olivia's house; I have also a very pretty galliard by Frescobaldi dating from 1637; a song called The Song of Anne Bullen, and said to have been written by her not long before her execution; I have also the tune of Greensleeves, which Shakspere mentions, and to which scores of sonnets and ballads were sung; and finally I have the Cuckoo Song, which is a good specimen of a song with a "burdoun" such as the Sompnour roared with the Pardoner in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. If I succeed in finding the voices to sing these part-songs properly, it is my desire to have the class meet at my own house, where we shall have the piano and other facilities for music; but of that you shall have due notice, and, unless you have notice, I will ask you to meet here as usual. I sincerely hope I may be able to get up the voices for the music, so that when you shall have heard it you will know what ideas Shakspere had in his mind when the bewildered Ferdinand, in The Tempest, following the sprite Ariel in the air, cries, "Where should this music be? i' th' air or th' earth?"

Some god o' th' island. Sitting on a bank,
Weeping again the king my father's wreck,
This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air.

This is no mortal business.

CHAPTER XIV

THE MUSIC OF SHAKSPERE'S TIME-II

N the last lecture I discussed the general cultivation of music in Shakspere's time, and Shakspere's own special fondness for the art. In the course of the discussion we arrived at a point where we found it surprising that Shakspere should have had such an exalted idea of the power of music in view of the fact that he lived a century before that development of the orchestra was accomplished which we regard as the only adequate form of music. Thus in considering the music which Shakspere did not hear, we were led to think of the kind of music which Shakspere did hear, and that is the subject of my lecture to-day.

I have more than once had occasion in different connections to mention the term "discant." In Shakspere's time that great species of musical form which bore this name may be said to have reached its climax. It had been a long time in doing so, however; for, in order to understand clearly the kind of music which for so many years, nay, for so many centuries, ministered to the souls of our elders in this world, we must go back a thousand

Pope Gregory the Great, with his Father and Mother

From an old engraving