three and four parts are no larger than Mozart’s piano sonatas.  Still, taking into account the noble quality that is constantly maintained, we must admit that Purcell used astonishingly the short time he was given.  Much of his music is lost; more of it lies in manuscript at the British Museum and elsewhere.  Some of it was issued last century, some early in this.  Four expensive volumes have been wretchedly edited and issued by the Purcell Society, and those amongst us who live to the age of Methuselah will probably see all the accessible works printed by this body.  Some half century ago Messrs. Novello published an edition of the church music, stupidly edited by the stupidest editor who ever laid clumsy fingers on a masterpiece.  A shameful edition of the “King Arthur” music was prepared for the Birmingham Festival of 1897 by Mr. J.A.  Fuller-Maitland, musical critic of “The Times.”  A publisher far-sighted and generous enough to issue a trustworthy edition of all Purcell’s music at a moderate price has yet to be found.

Purcell’s list is not long, but it is superb.  Yet he opened out no new paths, he made no leap aside from the paths of his predecessors, as Gluck did in the eighteenth century and Wagner in the nineteenth.  He was one of their school; he went on in the direction they had led; but the distance he travelled was enormous.  Humphries, possibly Captain Cook, even Christopher Gibbons, helped to open out the new way in church music; Lawes, Matthew Lock, and Banister were before him at the theatres; Lock and Dr. Blow had written odes before he was weaned; the form and plan of his sonatas came certainly from Bassani, in all likelihood from Corelli also; from John Jenkins and the other writers of fancies he got something of his workmanship and art of weaving many melodies into a coherent whole, and a knowledge of Lulli would help him to attain terseness, and save him from that drifting which is the weak point of the old English instrumental writers; he was acquainted with the music of Carissimi, a master of choral effect.  In a word, he owed much to his predecessors, even as Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven owed to their predecessors; and he did as they did—­won his greatness by using to fine ends the means he found, rather than by inventing the means, though, like them, some means he did invent.

Like his predecessors Purcell hung between the playhouse, the church, and the court; but unlike most of them he had only one style, which had to serve in one place as in another.  I have already shown the growth of the secular spirit in music.  In Purcell that spirit reached its height.  His music is always secular, always purely pagan.  I do not mean that it is inappropriate in the church—­for nothing more appropriate was ever written—­nor that Purcell was insincere, as our modern church composers are insincere, without knowing it.  I do mean that of genuine religious emotion, of the sustained ecstasy of Byrde and Palestrina, it shows no trace.