Jubilate should have remained as the culminating points.  The overture to the 1692 ode is unusually fragmentary.  I see no indication of any superior artistic aspiration in the fact that it consists of six short movements; rather, it seems to me that Purcell was, as ever, bent on pleasing his patrons—­in this case with plenty of variety.  Still, one movement leads naturally into the next, and scrappiness is avoided, and the music is of a high quality and full of vitality.  Purcell frequently set a double bar at the end of a section, and makes two or more numbers where a modern composer would simply change the tempo and key-signature and go straight on, so that the scrappiness is only apparent.  In this ode an instance occurs.  There are fourteen numbers, but the last three are in reality one—­a chorus, a quartet and a chorus repeating the opening bars of the first chorus.  In a modern composition all would have run on with never a double bar.  Purcell seems to have had no opportunity of designing another ode on the same broad scale as this.  At any rate, he never did so, and the ode which did more than any other of his achievements, save, perhaps, the Yorkshire Feast-Song of 1689, to convince his contemporaries of his greatness, abides as his noblest monument in this department of music.

Just as by writing music for plays which will never be acted again Purcell cut off his appeal to after generations of play-goers, so by writing anthems on a model sadly out of place in a sacred service he hid himself from future church-goers.  King Charles liked his Church music as good as you like, but lively at all costs, and the royal mind speedily wearying of all things in turn, he wished the numbers that made up an anthem to be short.  So Purcell wasted his time and magnificent thematic material on mere strings of scrappy, jerky sections.  The true Purcell touch is on them all, but no sooner has one entered fairly into the spirit of a passage than it is finished.  Instrumental interludes—­if, indeed, they can be called interludes, for they are as important as the vocal sections—­abound, and might almost be curtain-tunes from the plays.  Nothing can be done to make these anthems of any use in church.  Eighteenth and nineteenth century editors have laid clumsy fingers on them, curtailing the instrumental bits; but nothing is gained by this rough-and-ready process, as no Purcell has ever appeared to lengthen the vocal portions.  As Purcell left the anthems, so we must leave them—­exquisite fragments that we may delight in, but that are of no use in the service for which they were composed.  Still, this does not apply to them all; at least twenty of the finest are splendidly schemed, largely designed, and will come into our service lists more frequently when English Church musicians climb out of the bog in which they are now floundering.  They are full, if I may use the phrase, of pagan-religious feeling.  Purcell’s age was not a devotional age, and Purcell