Arts School, Cambridge, 4 February 1871

One thing that first arrests our attention in reviewing the history of modern music is its very rapid development within the last two centuries, and the small number of great master minds employed in that development. Whatever progress music may have made during the middle ages is a question, it may be, of deep interest to the musical historian. There is no doubt, however, that the works with which the musician has chiefly to do were all written in one short epoch of the world's history, in which a few great masters follow so closely upon each other, that there is never a link missing in that brilliant chain, and each one increased tenfold the profits of his predecessors’ labours.

One of the results of our great masters’ living in point of time so closely together is that unless we look closely into dates, we are always apt to consider them too much as contemporaries, and forgetting the influence which the mere progress of time had on the progress of art, to draw comparisons between the contributions of each ﹛of them﹜ to the art.

The fact that these great musicians lived almost within the memory of man&of our having every source of information respecting them easily open to us, the ease also with which any one can collect all the works of these masters – these circumstances aid us in drawing comparisons between their achievements; and the very fact of discovering in our researches how nearly equal was their genius, and how difficult it would be to show which had done most for music, gives an interest & a weight to that question so often asked (& often rashly answered): which of the great musicians was the greatest? But as there seems nothing to gain by a decision concerning the relative greatness of these masters, so discussions of such a question are apt to lead to much prejudice, to partisanship hastily formed on a hollow basis and productive of dire results to him who attends to them.