There is no doubt that the peril to which music was exposed at the time of the Tridentine Council was a serious and real one.  When we remember how intimate was the connection between the higher kinds of music and the ritual of the Church, this will be apparent.  Nor is it too much to affirm that the art at that crisis, but for the favor shown to it by Pius IV. and for Palestrina’s intervention, might have been well-nigh extinguished in Italy.  How fatal the results would then have been for the development of modern music, can be estimated by considering the decisive part played by the Italians in the formation of musical style from the end of the sixteenth century onwards to the age of Gluck, Handel, Haydn and Mozart.  Had the music of the Church in Italy been confined at that epoch to Plain Song, as the Congregation of Reform threatened, the great Italian school of vocalization would not have been founded, the Conservatories of Naples and the Scuole of Venice would have been silent, and the style upon which, dating from Palestrina’s inventions, the evolution of all species of the art proceeded, would have passed into oblivion.

That this proposition is not extravagant, the history of music in England will suffice to prove.  Before the victory of Puritan principles in Church and State, the English were well abreast of other races in this art.  During the sixteenth century, Tallis, Byrd, Morland, Wilbye, Dowland and Orlando Gibbons could hold their own against Italian masters.  The musical establishments of cathedrals, royal and collegiate chapels, and noble houses were nurseries for artists.  Every English home, in that age, like every German home in the eighteenth century, abounded in amateurs who were capable of performing part-songs and concerted pieces on the lute and viol with correctness.  Under the regime of the Commonwealth this national growth of music received a check from which it never afterwards recovered.  Though the seventeenth century witnessed the rising of one eminent composer, Purcell; though the eighteenth was adorned with meritorious writers of the stamp of Blow and Boyce; yet it is obvious that the art remained among us unprogressive, at a time when it was making gigantic strides in Italy and Germany.  It is always dangerous to attribute the decline of art in a nation to any one cause.  Yet I think it can scarcely be contested that the change of manners and of temperament wrought in England by the prevalence of Puritan opinion, had much to answer for in this premature decay of music.  We may therefore fairly argue that if the gloomy passion of intolerant fanaticism which burned in men like Caraffa and Ghislieri had prevailed in Italy—­a passion analogous in its exclusiveness to Puritanism—­or if no composer, in the place of Palestrina, had satisfied the requirements of the Council and the congregation, the history of music in Italy and Europe to us-wards would have been far different.