temporary guide-posts or landmarks which the contrapuntal men set up for their own private use while they were exploring the unknown fields of music.  We should know, though many of us do not, that it is simply stupid to pass adverse judgment on the early composers who did not use, and because they did not use, these guide-posts, which had not then been set up, though one by one they were being set up.  For a very short time the rules of counterpoint were looked upon as eternal and immutable.  During that period the early men were human-naturally looked upon as barbarians.  But that period is long past.  We know the laws of counterpoint to be not eternal, not immutable; but on the contrary to have been short-lived convention that is now altogether disregarded.  So it is time to look at the early music through our own, and not through the eighteenth-century doctors’ eyes; and when we do that we find the early music to be as beautiful as any ever written, as expressive, and quite as well constructed.  There are, as I have said, people who to-day prefer Mr. Jackson in F and his friends to Byrde.  What, I wonder, would be said if a literary man preferred, say, some eighteenth-century poetaster to Chaucer because the poetaster in his verse observed rules which Chaucer never dreamed of, because, to drag in Artemus Ward once again, the poetaster’s spelling conformed more nearly to ours than Chaucer’s!

The Mass is indeed noble and stately, but it is miraculously expressive as well.  Its expressiveness is the thing that strikes one more forcibly every time one hears it.  At first one feels chiefly its old-world freshness—­not the picturesque spring freshness of Purcell and Handel, but a freshness that is sweet and grave and cool, coming out of the Elizabethan days when life, at its fastest, went deliberately, and was lived in many-gabled houses with trees and gardens, or in great palaces with pleasant courtyards, and the Thames ran unpolluted to the sea, and the sun shone daily even in London, and all things were fair and clean.  It is old-world music, yet it stands nearer to us than most of the music written in and immediately after Handel’s period, the period of dry formalism and mere arithmetic.  There is not a sign of the formal melodic outlines which we recognise at once in any piece out of the contrapuntal time, not an indication that the Academic, “classical,” unpoetic, essay-writing eighteenth century was coming.  The formal outlines had not been invented, for rules and themes that would work without breaking the rules were little thought of.  Byrde evades the rules in the frankest manner:  in this Mass alone there are scores of evasions that would have been inevitably condemned a century afterwards, and might even be condemned by the contrapuntists of to-day.  The eighteenth-century doctors who edited Byrde early in this century did not in the least understand why he wrote as he did, and doubtless would have put him right if they had thought of having the