From the PREFACE: KEYBOARD music owes much to England. At the time when in the other countries of Europe it still dragged in the wake of vocal and organ music, in the British Isles it acquired an individuality and a technique of its own which place it on a very high level as a factor in evolution. Moreover, there has come down to us from the period of these sources — which extend from about 1550 to 1630 — a considerable quantity of material, the aesthetic value of which cannot be gainsaid. The principal collection from which a fairly complete idea of this music can be formed, the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, has now been made accessible by the edition in modern notation produced in 1899 by Messrs. Fuller Maitland and Barclay Squire. The greater part of the following study is based on the analysis of this precious document. There are some others which circumstances have allowed the author to become acquainted with in a manner only partial or at second hand. For this reason the work now given to the public has no pretentions to be definitive. Its only merit is to offer for the first time a general view of the subject, together with a thorough analysis of its various aspects. The writer has endeavored above all things to be clear and systematic, and to co-ordinate the subject at all times with the general lines of the history of music in Europe. Never losing sight of the claims of erudition, it has been his object not to neglect the attractions either of general inferences or of purely aesthetic considerations: of set purpose he has avoided the examination of certain questions of a too technical nature and of insufficient actual importance, such as notation, fingering, and the collation of the different manuscripts of keyboard music. In this manner he hopes that he has succeeded in performing a duty which by its character of general interest answers at once to the demands of modern musicology, and to the wishes of artists and enlightened amateurs to penetrate the secrets of a subject of exceptional interest. Published originally in French in 1912, the present work has been translated into English on the initiative of Messrs. Novello & Co., Ltd. The author has availed himself of this opportunity to make certain improvements, and to add to its completeness by means of new material which he has since been able to collect.