who was herself a
composer, and had perhaps a romance of her own, down there in Juliet's
country where her Flemish father took her.

How otherwise is the domestic life of Jacques de Wert, whose wife
conspired against him heinously, and put his very life in danger! When
he was well rid of this baggage, he fell into an intrigue with a lady
of the court of Ferrara. Her name was Tarquinia Molza, and she was a
poetess, but her relatives frowned upon the alliance of her poetry and
his music, and forced her to go back to her mother at Mantua, where she
outlived De Wert some twenty-seven years.

His is such a life as one would take to prove the unsettling effects of
music; yet what shall we say then of Josse Boutmy, who lived
ninety-nine years and raised twelve children, spending the greater part
of his life with his faithful spouse in one long struggle against
poverty, one eternal drudgery for the pence necessary to educate his
family? Shall we not say that he was as truly influenced by music as
Jacques de Wert?

De Wert had gone to Italy as a boy, and you might be after blaming
those soft Italian skies for his amorous troubles. But then you'll
encounter such a life as that of Palestrina spent altogether in Italy.
He married young. Her name was Lucrezia, and their life seems to have
been one of ideal devotion. She bore him four sons, and stood by him in
all his troubles, brightening the twilight of poverty, adorning that
high noon of his glory, when the Pope himself turned to Palestrina, and
implored him to reform and rescue the whole music of the Church from
its corruptions. It was well that Lucrezia could offer him solace, for
unwittingly she had once brought him his direst distress. When he was
recovered and well, a better post was offered him, and things ran
smoothly till, twenty-five years later, Lucrezia died, leaving him
broken-hearted with only one worthless son to embitter the last
fourteen years of his widowed life. His most poignantly impressive
motets seem to have been written under the anguish of Lucrezia's death.
The finest of them is his setting of the words:

"By the River of Babylon we have set us down and wept,
Remembering Thee, oh, Zion;
Upon the willows we have hung our harps,"

which, as E.H. Pember says, "may well have represented to himself, the
heart-broken composer, mourning by the banks of the Tiber, for the lost
wife whom he had loved so long."

Close upon so noble a life, artistic and