himself, though he wrote Church music in a serious, reverential spirit, could not detach himself from his age and get back to the sublime religious ecstasy of Byrde.  He seizes upon the texts to paint vivid descriptive pieces; he thrills you with lovely passages or splendours of choral writing; but he did not try to express devotional moods that he never felt.  A mood very close to that of religious ecstasy finds a voice in “Thou knowest, Lord, the Secrets of our Hearts”—­the mood of a man clean rapt away from all earthly affairs, and standing face to face, alone, with the awful mystery of “the infinite and eternal energy from which all things proceed.”  It is plain, direct four-part choral writing, but the accent is terrible in its distinctness.  At Queen Mary’s funeral (we can judge from Tudway’s written reflections) the audience was overwhelmed, and we may believe it.  A more elaborately wrought and longer piece of work is the setting of the Latin Psalm, “Jehova, quam multi sunt.”  It is the high-water mark of all Church music after the polyphonists.  By Church music I mean music written for the Church, not necessarily religious music.  The passage at “Ego cubui et dormivi” is sublime, Purcell’s discords creating an atmosphere of strange beauty, almost unearthly, and that yields to the unspeakable tenderness of the naive phrase at the words, “Quia Jehovah sustentat me.”  The Te Deum was until recently known only by Dr. Boyce’s perversion.  Dr. Boyce is reputed to have been an estimable moral character, and it is to be hoped he was, for that is the best we can say of him.  He was a dunderheaded worshipper and imitator of Handel.  Thinking that Purcell had tried to write in the Handelian bow-wow, and for want of learning had not succeeded; thinking also that he, Dr. Boyce, being a musical doctor, had that learning, he took Purcell’s music in hand, and soon put it all right—­turned it, that is, into a clumsy, forcible-feeble copy of Handel.  One could scarcely recognise Purcell so blunderingly disguised.  However, we now know better, and the Te Deum stands before us, pure Purcell, in all its beauty, freshness, sheer strength, and, above all, naive direct mode of utterance.  It looks broken, but does not sound broken.  Purcell simply went steadily through the canticle, setting each verse as he came to it to the finest music possible.  The song “Vouchsafe, O Lord,” is an unmatched setting of the words for the solo alto, full of very human pathos; and some of the choral parts are even more brilliant than the odes.  The Jubilate is almost as fine; but we must take both, not as premature endeavours to work Handelian wonders, but as the full realisations of a very different ideal.  THE FOUR-PART SONATAS.