onged vowel sounds. The Greeks
caroled on vowels in honor of their deities. From these practices
descended into the musical part of the earliest Christian worship a
certain rhapsodic and exalted style of delivery, which is believed to
have been St. Paul's "gift of tongues."

That this element should have disappeared for a considerable time from
the church music is not at all remarkable, for in the first steps toward
regulating the liturgy simplification was a prime requisite. Thus in the
centuries before Gregory the plain chant gained complete ascendancy in
the church and under him it acquired a systematization which had in it
the elements of permanency.

Yet it was through the adaptation of this very chant to the delineation
of episodes in religious history that the path to the opera was opened.
The church slowly built up a ritual which offered no small amount of
graphic interest for the eyes of the congregation. As ceremonials became
more and more elaborate, they approached more and more closely the
ground on which the ancient dramatic dance rested, and it was not long
before they themselves acquired a distinctly dramatic character. It is
at this point that the liturgical ancestry of the opera becomes quite
manifest. The dance itself, at first an attempt to delineate
dramatically by means of measured movement, and thus the origin of the
art of dramatic action, was not without its place in the early church.
The ancient pagan festivals made use of the dance, and the early
Christians borrowed it from them. At one time Christian priests executed
solemn dances before their altars just as their Greek predecessors had
done. But in the course of time the dance became generally practised by
the congregation and this gave rise to abuses. The authorities of the
church abandoned it. But the feeling for it lingered, and in after years
issued in the employment of the procession. When the procession left the
sanctuary and displayed itself in the open air, something of the nature
of the dance returned to it and its development into a dramatic
spectacle was not difficult.

According to Magnin[1] the lyric drama of the Middle Ages had three
sources,--the aristocracy, religion and the people. Coussemaker finds
that this lyric drama had in its inception two chief varieties, namely,
the secular drama, and the religious or liturgical drama. "Each of these
dramas," he says, "had its own particular subject matter, character,
charms and st