The writings of Cassiodorus evince great erudition, ingenuity and labour, but are disfigured by incorrectness and an affected artificiality, and his Latin partakes much of the corruptions of the age.
In spite of the incorrectness of his diction, he was gifted with a genuine eloquence, and well knew how to carry the populace with him.
As to colour, he follows Goethe, and uses strong language against Newton's theory, for the barbarism of the conception that light is a compound, the incorrectness of his observations, &c. In chemistry, again, he objects to the way in which all the chemical elements are treated as on the same level.
A volume might be written on Orlando di Lasso's art of so crossing the voices as to render possible successions of chords which, on a keyed instrument where such crossing cannot be expressed, would be a horrible series of consecutive fifths; the beauty of the device consisting in the extreme simplicity of the chords, combined with the novelty due to the fact that these chords cannot be produced by any ordinary means without incorrectness.
