for musical education in default of schools.  We who represent art in the cathedrals are as much despised as were the minstrels in the old chapels, players of the clarion and bassoon.  For the canons, all that sleeps in the musical archives is so much Greek, and we, the artistic priests, form a race apart, and are only just a step above the sacristans.  The Chapel-master, the organist, the tenor, contralto, and the bass form the chapel.  We are clergy like the canons, we become beneficiaries by appointment, we have studied religious science as they have, and, moreover, we are musicians; but in spite of this we receive less than half the salary of a canon, and to remind us constantly of our inferior position we have to sit in the lower stalls.  We, the only ones in the choir who know anything about music, have to occupy the lowest places.  The precentor is by right the chief of the singers, and the precentor is a canon named by Rome without competition, probably not knowing a note of the pentagramma.  Oh! the anarchy, friend Gabriel!  Oh! the contempt of the Church for music which has always been its slave and never its daughter!  In many convents of nuns the organist and the singers are despised and called sergeants.  There seems money for everything in the Church:  the revenues of the building are ample for everything except for music.  The canons look upon us as fools masking in ecclesiastical robes.  When the feast of Corpus or that of the Virgin of the Sagrario comes round, and I dream of a fine mass worthy of the Cathedral, the Canon Obrero attacks me and begs for something Italian and simple, an affair of half-a-dozen musicians that I must pick up in the town, and then I have to conduct a few bungling musicians, raging to hear how the miserable orchestra sounds under these vaults, which were built for something grander.  In the end, friend Luna, it is dead, quite dead.”

The complaint of the Chapel-master did not surprise Gabriel.  Everyone in the Cathedral complained of the miserable and sordid way in which the services were conducted.  Some, like the Silver Stick, declared that it was due to the impiety of the age, others, like the musician, made that same religion responsible, but they did not dare to say so aloud.  Respect to the Church and to the higher powers, instilled since their childhood, kept the population of the Cathedral silent.  The greater part of the servitors of the Church were living morally in the sixteenth century, in an atmosphere of servility and superstitious fear of their superiors, feeling the injustice of their position, but without daring to give form, even in their thoughts, to their vague notions of protest.

Only at night, in the silence of the upper cloister, in the privacy of those families who were born and died among the stones of the Cathedral, did they dare to repeat the murmurs of the Church, the interminable tangle of tattle which grew over the monotonous ecclesiastical existence, the complaints of the canons against His Eminence, and what the cardinal said about the Chapter, an underground war which was reproduced at every archiepiscopal elevation, intrigues and heart-burnings of celibates, embittered by ambition and favouritism, primitive hatreds that reminded one of the time when the clergy elected their own prelates and ruled over them, instead of groaning as now under the iron rule of the archbishop’s will.