hey are for the most part worthy
of Palestrina himself. The date of his death is conjecturally given as
1630. His brother, Giovanni Francesco, was born about 1567, and seems
to have died about 1620. The occasional attribution of some of his
numerous compositions to his elder brother is a pardonable mistake, if
we may judge by the works that have been reprinted. But the statement,
which continues to be repeated in standard works of reference,
that "he was one of the first of Italians to use the quaver and its
subdivisions" is incomprehensible. Quavers were common property in
all musical countries quite early in the 16th century, and semiquavers
appear in a madrigal of Palestrina published in 1574. The two brothers
are probably the latest composers who handled 16th-century music
as their mother-language; suffering neither from the temptation to
indulge even in such mild neologisms as they might have learnt
from the elder brother's master, Nanino, nor from the necessity of
preserving their purity of style by a mortified negative asceticism.
They wrote pure polyphony because they understood it and loved it, and
hence their work lives, as neither the progressive work of their
own day nor the reactionary work of their imitators could live. The
12-part _Stabat Mater_ in the seventh volume of Palestrina's complete
works has been by some authorities ascribed to Felice Anerio.

[v.02 p.0004]

ANET, a town of northern France, in the department of Eure-et-Loir,
situated between the rivers Eure and Vegre, 10 m. N.E. of Dreux by
rail. Pop. (1906) 1324. It possesses the remains of a magnificent
castle, built in the middle of the 16th century by Henry II. for Diana
of Poitiers. Near it is the plain of Ivry, where Henry IV. defeated
the armies of the League in 1590.

ANEURIN, or ANEIRIN, the name of an early 7th-century British (Welsh)
bard, who has been taken by Thomas Stephens (1821-1875), the editor
and translator of Aneurin's principal epic poem _Gododin_, for a
son of Gildas, the historian. _Gododin_ is an account of the British
defeat (603) by the Saxons at Cattraeth (identified by Stephens with
Dawstane in Liddesdale), where Aneurin is said to have been taken
prisoner; but the poem is very obscure and is differently interpreted.
It was translated and edited by W.F. Skene in his _Four Ancient
Books of Wales_ (1866), and Stephens' version was published by the
Cymmrodorion Society in 1888. See CELT: _Literature_ (Welsh).