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.