expensive. Let us not repine and give up hope. Some day that unheard-of thing an intelligent music publisher may be born into the world, and he may give Englishmen a trustworthy edition, at a fair price, of the works of England's greatest musician. Meantime, the reader must do as the writer did for some years—he must grub and laboriously copy in the British Museum, buying, when he can, the seventeenth-century edition of Dioclesian and the eighteenth-century editions of such works as The Tempest and The Indian Queen, and also the Orpheus Britannicus. To penetrate to Purcell's intention, to understand with what skill and force the intention is carried out, a knowledge of the music alone hardly suffices. I would not advise anything so terrible as an endeavour to read the whole of the plays, but at least Boadicca, The Indian Queen, The Tempest, The Fairy Queen, Dioclesian and King Arthur must be read; and it is worth while making an effort especially to grasp all the details of the masques. For themselves, few of the plays are worth reading; and, unluckily, the best of them have the least significant music. The others are neither serious plays nor good honest comedy; and a malicious fate willed that the very versions for which Purcell's aid was required were the worst of all—what little sense there was in the bad plays was destroyed when they were made into "operas" or "entertainments"—spectacular shows. Dryden was the best of the playwrights he was doomed to work with, and in King Arthur Dryden forgot about the aim and purpose of high drama, and concocted a hobgoblin pantomime interlarded with bravado concerning the greatness of Britain and Britons. Dioclesian, the first of Purcell's great theatre achievements, is even more stupid. The original play was The Prophetess of Beaumont and Fletcher, straightforward Elizabethan stodge and fustian: and if Betterton, who chose to maltreat it, was bent on making the very worst play ever written, it must be conceded that his success was nearly complete. It gets down to the plane of pure and sparkling idiocy that the world admires in, say, "The Merry Widow." Yet the masque afforded him opportunities of which he made splendid use. The overture is a noble piece of workmanship. There is a Handelian dignity without any bow-wow or stiffness, and the freshness and freedom are of a kind that Handel never attained to. Of course, it has no connection with the drama: it would serve for many another play just as well. What the theatre manager demanded of Purcell was a piece of music to occupy the audience before the curtain went up; and Purcell wrote it. There are songs and dances of a rare quality, and the biggest thing of all is the chorus, "Let all rehearse," which rivals Handel's "Fixed in his everlasting seat," a plain copy of it, down to many small points. Those who say Purcell had no influence upon his successors evidently know little either of Purcell's music or Handel's. Handel owed much to Purcell, and not least was the massive, direct way of dealing with the chorus, the very characteristic which has kept his oratorios so popular here and so unpopular abroad. Handel's mighty choral effects are English: he learnt from Purcell how to make them. It is true enough that Purcell learnt something from Carissimi; but Carissimi's effects are very often of that kind that look better on paper than they sound in performance. The variations over ground-basses are marvellously ingenious, but more marvellous than the ingenuity are the charming delicacy and expressiveness of the melodies woven in the upper parts. They are music which appeals direct to listeners who care nothing for technical problems. Some of the discords may sound a little odd to those who have been trained to regard the harmonic usages of the Viennese school as the standard of perfection. Dr. Burney thought them blunders resulting from an imperfect technique. Later a few words must be said on the subject, but let me for the present point out that Purcell was a master of the theory as well as of the practice of composition. He loved these discords, and deliberately wrote them; he could have justified them, and there is hardly one that we cannot justify. Purcell could write intricate fugues and canons without any "harsh progressions"; that he liked these for their own sake is obvious in numberless pieces where no laws of counterpoint compelled him to write this note rather than that. And though in the eyes of the theorists they are harsh, in the ears of all men they are sweet. The works of Purcell and of Mozart are the sweetest music ever composed, yet both composers filled their music with discords—"that give delight and hurt not."

In 1691 Purcell and Dryden did King Arthur together. The poet had by this time forsaken Monsieur Grabut, who had in his eyes at one time stood for all that was commendable in music. Grabut was more ingenious as a business man than as a musician, but not all his ingenuity served to prevent the English discovering that he could not write pleasing tunes and that Purcell could.[1] Whether Dryden felt any difference whatever between good and bad music I cannot say: he may have been like many of the poets, music-deaf (analogous to colour-blind). They are said to have been good friends, which I can well believe; and Dryden, when pursued by duns and men with writs and such implements of torture, is said to have stowed himself secretly in Purcell's room in the clock-tower of St. James's Palace, which one may believe or not, according to the mood of the moment. Anyhow, he seems to have been happy to work with Purcell, and for the spectacles in King Arthur they laid their two heads together and arranged some dazzling things which no one would care to see nowadays. King Arthur is almost as brilliant as Dioclesian, and contains some exceedingly patriotic songs. The stage in England always threatens most bloodshed to England's foes when those foes might seem to an impartial observer to be having the better of it. Only a few years ago the heroes of the music-hall menaced the Boers with unspeakable castigations when only they could be persuaded to leave off unaccountably thrashing our generals; and when Purcell wrote "Come if you Dare," and many another martial ditty, the time had not long passed when Van Tromp sailed up the Thames with a broom at his mast-head. All the same, "Come if you Dare" is a fine song; "Fairest Isles, all Isles excelling," is one of Purcell's loveliest thoughts, and the words are more boastful than ferocious; "Saint George, the Patron of our Isle," is brilliant and the words are innocuous. The masque element is not dumped into King Arthur altogether so shamelessly as in other cases; the whole play is a masque. Although there is a plot, the supernatural is largely employed, and nymphs, sirens, magicians, and what not, gave the composer notable chances. In the first act, the scene where the Saxons sacrifice to Woden and other of their gods, is the occasion for a chain of choruses, each short but charged with the true energy divine; then comes a "battle symphony," noisy but mild—a sham fight with blank cartridge; and after the battle the Britons sing a "song of victory," our acquaintance "Come if you Dare, the Trumpets Sound." The rest of the work is mainly enchantments and the like. More fairy-like music has never entered a musician's dreams than Philidel's "Hither this way," and the chorus which alternates with the solo part is as elfin, will-o'-th'-wispish, as anything of Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn is Purcell's only rival in such pictures. At the beginning of the celebrated Frost Scene, where Cupid calls up "thou genius of the clime" (the clime being Arctic), we get a specimen of Purcell's "word-painting":

This "word-painting," it must be noted, is of the very essence of Purcell's art, at any rate in vocal music. Suggestions came to him from