Even Josquin did not make a long sojourn in Italy. After but a few years' residence, he quitted Rome, on the death of his patron Sixtus IV. (in 1484) and presented himself at the court of Hercules I., Duke of Ferrara. There is no reason for believing that he met with any other than the hospitable reception generally afforded by this accomplished and munificent Prince to men of genius of all kinds, for Josquin's reputation was by this time European. Some accident, however, or more likely an inconstant temper, took him soon back again to the north; after which we find him resident at Paris, at the court of Louis XII.

A personal service which he rendered his new master has been recorded, among other examples of the versatility of Josquin's talent. The king, though fond of music, had never studied it. Not only so, his natural aptitude for the art was of the very least. In plain terms, his Majesty had a very bad voice, and sang habitually out of tune. Fortunately for those of his subjects whose privilege it was to be immediately about him, he was quite aware of his own infirmity. One day however the whim seized him to commission Josquin to write something in which he himself could take part. Josquin met the difficulty in a very ingenious manner. He constructed a quartet, the two upper parts of which formed a canon in unison, to which he added a free bass; the fourth part, the vox regis, as he somewhat saucily called it, being confined to a single note, which it was the business of the king to reiterate, almost incessantly, throughout the piece.

Josquin was a man of wit. Many instances are recorded of his ready exercise of it. His office at court, however honourable, was evidently not a very remunerative one; for he is said to have been reduced to indigence while waiting for a small benefice that had been promised him by his royal master. In his distress he applied to a courtier whom he had formerly known in Italy, who always replied to him in the same words;

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Popularity of Josquin.

"Lascia fare mi,” “leave the matter to me." Weary of this reply, he composed a mass, of which the principal subject consisted of the notes La, Sol, Fa, Re, Mi; which notes, and syllables, repeated over and over again in a long work, immediately excited attention, and eventually brought the matter again to the king's mind; to so little purpose, however, that Josquin had to resort to a new contrivance. He set as an anthem for the Chapel Royal the words " Memor esto verbi tuo," "O think upon Thy servant as concerning Thy word;" which being still without effect, he then tried his hand upon "Portio mea non est in terrâ vivantium." This was irresistible: Josquin obtained his benefice and poured out his gratitude in a third anthem, "Bonitatem fecisti cum servo tuo, Domine," "Lord, Thou hast dealt graciously with Thy servant." A cynical French Biographer tells us that this third composition was not at all up to the mark of its predecessors. Let us hope this is not true.

I cannot afford to dwell longer on the personnel of Josquin Deprès whose career might well furnish material for an entire lecture. He is said, later in life, to have taken service with the Emperor Maximilian who eventually gave him a canonry at Condé where he ended his days, about the year 1515.

But for considerations which I shall have to bring under your notice in my next Lecture, one might be inclined to despair of the possibility of lasting fame for any musical composer or composition. During the lifetime of Josquin Deprès, his popularity at least equalled that of any musician who has yet appeared. The Abbate Baini, to whom I shall again have occasion to refer, and who has left a splendid testimony of his admiration for the music of the Second Period in his "Life of Palestrina,"* speaks thus of Josquin :—

* "Memorie Storico-critiche della Vita di G. P. da Palestrina," &c. &c. Compilate da Giuseppe Baini, Sacerdote Romano, Cappellano Cantore, e Direttore della Cappella Pontificia. Roma, 1828. Vol. ii. p. 407.

"In a short time, by his new productions, he becomes the idol of Europe. There is no longer tolerance for any one but Josquin. Nothing is beautiful unless it be the work of Josquin. Josquin alone is sung in every chapel in Christendom. Nobody but Josquin in Italy, nobody but Josquin in France, nobody but Josquin in Germany, in Flanders, in Hungary, in SpainJosquin and Josquin alone."

The praises of his contemporaries might fill a small volume. Luther, in musical matters an excellent authority, a singer and composer, said of him, "Other musicians do what they can with notes, Josquin does what he likes with them." His death was followed by innumerable elegies, epitaphs, and other encomiastic pieces, many of which were set to music by his pupils. Among his works are found compositions of every variety practised in his day. Greatest and most prolific in the greatest style, he was no less delightful, to his public at least, in compositions of a lighter class. He was not simply more learned in the science, and more skilled in the art, of music than any predecessor or contemporary; he was unquestionably a great and original genius. I shall have occasion to speak of him in another lecture as having discovered and appreciated certain musical resources which cannot be said to have been fully turned to account till at least a century after his death.

And with all this, what living singer has ever sung, or what living amateur has ever heard, a note of his music? Specimens of it are not current, it is true; but neither are they inaccessible. Three hundred and fifty years are as nothing in the lifetime of a book, a building, a statue,-even of a picture, so much more perishable. To speak only of our own era. Dante had need of a commentator before Josquin could have learnt to read; the frescoes of Giotto were beginning to decay ere he visited Italy, and the beautiful cathedral of St. Quintin had entered its third century ere he first raised his voice in it. Has the interest in these persons and things declined? Moments there have been,

doubtless, when it has been less extensive and less hearty than it is now; but they have known no lengthened term of neglect or indifference. Not so the old music and the old musicians. "The cold chain of silence" has hung over the harp of Josquin Deprès for three centuries. Hidden first by his immediate successors, and subsequently, like them in turn, by theirs-all as much his works as were his masses and motets-his productions can scarcely be said to have survived him, save in those of other men. It is to be feared that this indifference, if not to Josquin's memory, at least to his music, will prove irremediable: his fame will know "no second spring."

I have said that Josquin's visit to Rome was an event of the greatest importance as regards the history of music. It was the signal for a new invasion of the Italian peninsula. Again, after an interval of near a thousand years, were the Goth and the Burgundian, the Belgian and the Gaul to set foot on Italian soil; but this time with what different intent! and in what a different capacity! Not to obliterate or to deface, but to restore and to edify; not as barbarian conquerors, but as teachers of the gentlest and the humanest of the arts.

This new immigration of "barbarians" was a great step in political economy. It established free-trade in that which only one small people had to sell, and all the rest of the world wanted to buy. In the latter part of the fifteenth century the musical science and skill which had hitherto been pent up within the confines of the Low Countries, were distributed all over Europe. At this epoch we find the contemporaries and pupils of Josquin in every court and great city of the Continent. Tinctor, Garnier, and Hycart (all three Gallo-Belgians) were laying the foundations of a school at Naples, destined afterwards to take precedence, for a time, of all others. Of Josquin's pupils, and countrymen, Nicholas Gombert was chapel-master to the Emperor Charles V. John Mouton held the same office at the court of Francis I. Eleazer Genet, surnamed Carpentras, from

the place of his birth, made so great an impression on Pope Leo X., by his setting of a portion of the "Lamentations of Jeremiah," that he made him a bishop (in partibus), and afterwards sent him on a special mission into France as legate. Henry Isaac, a German by birth but a Belgian by education, was at Florence composing masses for the church of St. Giovanni, and Carnival Songs for Lorenzo de' Medici; and, a little later, after long years of wanderings, even into Hungary and Bohemia, we find Andrew Willaert (another Fleming) settled, as it proved, for life in Venice; there to found another school whose disciples were afterwards to carry back to the north, with large interest, the capital advanced by her children-northern strength graced by southern sweetness.

It would be useless to multiply these instances. One proof of Belgian influence at this time, however, must be cited. About the year 1502,* Ottavio Petrucci, a native of Fossembrone in the Papal States, who had recently invented musical types, set up a printing press in Venice, from which he sent forth in rapid succession, during a series of years, a prodigious number of Masses, Motets, and other music by the most eminent masters of the time. These, with hardly an exception, were all compositions of the Gallo-Belgian school. If it be considered that the printer was himself neither a Belgian nor a Frenchman, and that he printed, of course, such works as he thought would find the best sale, we have irrefragable evidence of the popularity of Gallo-Belgian music at this epoch.

But it is to Rome that we must now turn all our attention; for it is in the Eternal City that the somewhat tangled web of our history has to be taken up, and for a time kept in hand.

Notwithstanding the number of Belgian masters who visited and taught in Italy in the last years of the fifteenth and the first of the sixteenth century, no regular music school was opened in Rome before the year 1540. Many Italians howOnly half a century after the invention of printing.