feather, he may not have made chronometers as exact
as those turned out nowadays, but the "Nuremberg eggs"--so called from
their place of origin and their shape, not a disk, but a sphere--were
marvels of chasing and incrustation and jewelry.

[Sidenote: Love of beauty]

The love of the beautiful was universal. The city of that time, less
commodious, sanitary, and populous than it is today, was certainly fairer
to the eye. Enough of old Nuremberg and Chester and Siena and Perugia
and many other towns remains to assure us that the red-tiled houses, the
overhanging storeys, the high gables and quaint dormer windows, presented
a {689} far more pleasing appearance than do our lines of smoky factories
and drab dwellings.

[Sidenote: Music]

The men so greedy of all delicate sights and pleasant, would fain also
stuff their ears with sweet sounds. And so they did, within the
limitations of a still undeveloped technique. They had organs, lutes,
viols, lyres, harps, citherns, horns, and a kind of primitive piano known
as the clavichord or the clavicembalo. Many of these instruments were
exquisitely rich and delicate in tone, but they lacked the range and
volume and variety of our music. Almost all melodies were slow, solemn,
plaintive; the tune of Luther's hymn gives a good idea of the style then
prevalent. When we read that the churches adopted the airs of popular
songs, so that hymns were sung to ale-house jigs and catches from the
street, we must remember that the said jigs and love-songs were at least
as sober and staid as are many of the tunes now expressly written for our
hymns. The composers of the time, especially Palestrina [Sidenote:
Palestrina, 1526-94] and Orlando Lasso, [Sidenote: Lasso, c. 1530-1594]
did wonders within the limits then possible to introduce richness and
variety into song.

[Sidenote: Art and religion]

Art was already on the decline when it came into conflict with the
religious revivals of the time. The causes of the decadence are not hard
to understand. The generation of giants, born in the latter half of the
fifteenth century, seemed to exhaust the possibilities of artistic
expression in painting and sculpture, or at least to exhaust the current
ideas so expressible. Guido Reni and the Caracci could do nothing but
imitate and recombine.

And then came the battle of Protestant and Catholic to turn men's minds
into other channels than that of beauty. Even when the Reformation was