ebrated penitential psalms of Di
Lasso, it is said that Charles IX. of France ordered them to be written
"in order to obtain rest for his soul after the horrible massacre of St.
Bartholomew." Aside from his works, this musician has a claim on
fame through his lasting improvements in musical form and method. He
illuminated, and at the same time closed, the great epoch of Belgian
ascendancy, which had given three hundred musicians of great science
to the times in which they lived. So much has been said of Orlando di
Lasso, for he was the model and Mentor of the greatest of early church
composers, Palestrina.

II.

The melodious and fascinating style, soon to give birth to the
characteristic genius of the opera, was as yet unborn, though dormant.
In Rome, the chief seat of the Belgian art, the exclusive study of
technical skill had frozen music to a mere formula. The Gregorian
chant had become so overladen with mere embellishments as to make the
prescribed church-form difficult of recognition in its borrowed garb,
for it had become a mere jumble of sound. Musicians, indeed, carried
their profanation so far as to take secular melodies as the themes for
masses and motetts. These were often called by their profane titles. So
the name of a love-sonnet or a drinking-song would sometimes be attached
to a miserere. The council of Trent, in 1562, cut at these evils with
sweeping axe, and the solemn anathemas of the church fathers roused the
creative powei's of the subject of this sketch, who raised his art to
an independent national existence, and made it rank with sculpture and
painting, which had already reached their zenith in Leonardo Da Vinci,
Raphael, Correggio, Titian, and Michel Angelo. Henceforth Italian music
was to be a vigorous, fruitful stock.

Giovanni Perluigui Aloisio da Palestrina was born at Palestrina, the
ancient Praeneste, in 1524.*

* Our composer, as was common with artists and scholars in
those days, took the name of his natal town, and by this he
is known to fame. Old documents also give him the old Latin
name of the town with the personal ending.

The memorials of his childhood are scanty. We know but little except
that his parents were poor peasants, and that he learned the rudiments
of literature and music as a choir-singer, a starting-point so common in
the lives of great composers. In 1540 he went to Rome and studied in
the school of Goudimel, a stern Huguenot Fleming, tole