benefice to marry a woman dowered with the name Madalena Guabaelaraoen.  But most of them kept their benefices and their sweethearts both, though we find it noted as worthy of mention in the epitaph of the composer and canon, Pierre de la Rue, in the 16th century, that as an “adorateur diligent du Tres-Haut, ministre du Christ, il sut garder la chastete et se preserver du contact de l’amour sensuel.”  But because you see it in an epitaph, it is not always necessarily so.

Sir John Hawkins, in his delightsome though ponderous history of music, tells of the disastrous infatuation of Angelus Politianus, who flourished in 1460 as a canon of the Church, and the teacher of the children of Lorenzo dei Medici.

“Ange Politien,” he says, “a native of Florence, who passed for the finest wit of his time in Italy, met with a fate which punished his criminal love.  Being professor of eloquence at Florence, he unhappily became enamoured of one of his young scholars who was of an illustrious family, but whom he could neither corrupt by his great presents, nor by the force of his eloquence.  The vexation he conceived at this disappointment was so great as to throw him into a burning fever; and in the violence of the fit he made two couplets of a song upon the object with which he was transported.  He had no sooner done this than he raised himself from his bed, took his lute, and accompanied it with his voice in an air so tender and affecting that he expired in singing the second couplet.”

Which reminds one of the actor Artemus Ward describes as having played Hamlet in a Western theatre, where, there being no orchestra, he was compelled to furnish his own slow music and to play on a flute as he died.

CHAPTER III.

THE MEN OF FLANDERS

The Belgian historian, Van der Straeten, has illuminated the crowded shelves of his big work, “La Musique aux Pays-Bas avant Le XIXe Siecle,” with various little instances of romance that occurred to the numberless minstrels and weavers of tangled counterpoint in the Netherlands of the old time.  Some of these instances are simply hints, upon which the fervid imagination will spin imaginary love yarns in endless gossamer.  Thus of Marc Houtermann (1537—­1577) “Prince of musicians” at Brussels.  All we know of his wife is from her epitaph.  She died the same year he died—­so we fancy it was of a broken heart she died; and she was only twenty-six at the time—­so we can imagine how young and lithely beautiful she must have been.  Her name, too, was Joanna Gavadia—­a sweet name, surely never wasted on an ungraceful woman; and on her tombstone she is called “pudicissima et musicis scientissima.”  So she was good and she was skilful in music, like Bach’s second wife; and doubtless, like her, of infinite help and delight to her husband.