SOURCE: "Music and Letters," in Essays and Studies, Vol. XVII, 1932, pp. 44-55.

In the following essay, Fuller-Maitland traces the relationship between the musical and literary arts in England from the Elizabethan age to the twentieth century.

Once upon a time the world of letters included Music among its departments. The education of the average Englishman in the Elizabethan days would not have been thought complete if he had not been taught something concerning the art, or at least something in the way of what we now call appreciation. The often-quoted passage in Morley's Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597), telling how a guest was put to confusion when the part-books were brought out and he was expected to join in madrigal-singing, may have been a little too highly coloured to be accepted as a literal statement of fact, since the treatise naturally gives an awful warning against...