music.  The promise of ’Trial by Jury’ was amply borne out by ‘The Sorcerer’ (1877), which remains in the opinion of many the best of the whole series of Gilbert and Sullivan operas—­but indeed there is hardly one of them that has not at one time or another been preferred above its fellows by expert opinion.  ’The Sorcerer’ naturally gave Sullivan more scope than ‘Trial by Jury.’  Here for the first time he showed what he could do in what may be called his old English vein, in reproduction of the graceful dance measures of old time, and in imitations of Elizabethan madrigals so fresh and tuneful that they seem less the resuscitation of a style long dead than the creation of an entirely new art-form.  In a different vein was the burlesque incantation, a masterpiece of musical humour, in which the very essence of Mr. Gilbert’s strange topsy-turvydom seems transmuted into sound.

In ‘H.M.S.  Pinafore’ (1878) Sullivan scored his first great popular success.  ‘The Sorcerer’ had appealed to the few; ‘Pinafore’ carried the masses by storm.  In humour and in musicianship alike it is less subtle than its predecessor, but it triumphed by sheer dash and high spirits.  There is a smack of the sea in music and libretto alike.  ‘Pinafore’ was irresistible, and Sullivan became the most popular composer of the day.  ‘The Pirates of Penzance’ (1880) followed the lines of ‘Pinafore,’ with humour perhaps less abundant but with an added touch of refinement.  There are passages in ‘The Pirates’ tenderer in tone, one might almost say more pathetic, than anything Sullivan had previously written, passages which gave more than a hint of the triumphs he was later to win in that mingling of tears and laughter of which he had the secret In ‘Patience’ (1881) musician and librettist mutually agreed to leave the realm of farcical extravagance, and to turn to satire of a peculiarly keen-edged and delicate kind—­that satire which caresses while it cuts, and somehow contrives to win sympathy for its object even when it is most mordant.  There are people nowadays who have been known to declare that the “aesthetic” movement had no existence outside the imagination of Mr. Gilbert and ‘Mr. Punch.’  In the eighties, however, everybody believed in it, and believed too that ‘Patience’ killed it.  What is quite certain is that, whoever killed it, ‘Patience’ embalmed it in odours and spices of the most fragrant and costly description, so that it has remained a thing of beauty even to our own day.  In ‘Iolanthe’ (1882) Mr. Gilbert reached the dizziest height of topsy-turvydom to which he ever climbed, and set Sullivan to solve what was perhaps the most difficult problem of his whole career.  To bring the atmosphere of fairyland into the House of Lords was a task which the most accomplished master of musical satire might well have refused, but Sullivan came victoriously through the ordeal.  His ‘Iolanthe’ music, with its blending of things aerial with things terrene, and its contrast