IN 1453, the year when John Dunstable was borne to his last resting-place in London City, the Eastern Roman Empire finally ended, and the last attempt of the English to retain their French conquests was frustrated. Gutenberg and Faust were printing Bibles. The Middle Ages were closing, and the Renascence of classical learning and art, quickly followed by the discovery of America, by the circumnavigation of Africa, and a generation later by the Reformation, brought the modern world into being. England passed through a period of fearful turmoil, of slaughter such as our huge modern battles have not caused, of change, excitement, unrest. The Wars of the Roses began in 1455, and did not altogether cease even at the Union of the Roses thirty years later. In those thirty years England lost her pre-eminence in the art of music; the English themselves did not believe so, but on the Continent their renown was quite eclipsed, the last choir-book which contains English works being that at Modena. For sixty or seventy years afterwards Netherland composers ruled the world in musical matters. But in the meantime the English, surpassed in ecclesiastical music, turned their attention especially to instruments; and they quickly found how to use the resources of the keyboard, perceiving that an entirely new style of music was required, that the styles neither of Dunstable nor of his Flemish successors were sufficient for these novel powers. Musical antiquaries are at present inclined to look for the origin of the spinet, virginal, clavicytherium, &c, in England; but we have no evidence other than that mentioned in Chap. I, which is far too slight to be sufficient by itself.