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.