might have been had Purcell lived, no one can say; but he died, and no great genius has arisen since. As for the cathedral organists who followed him chronologically, the less said about them the better. What kind of composers they were we can with sorrow see in the music they wrote; what skill as executants they possessed we may judge from the music they played and the beggarly organs they played on. We read of our "great Church musicians"—but these men were not musicians; and of the rich stores of Church music—but, however vast its quantity, it is not, properly speaking, music. The great English musicians who wrote for the Church before Purcell's time were Tallis, Byrde, Whyte, Orlando Gibbons, and they composed not for the English, but for the Roman Church. When I say that Pelham Humphries and Purcell were not religious at all, but purely secular composers, thoroughly pagan in spirit, I imply—or, if you like, exply—that the Church of England has had no religious musicians worth mentioning. Far be it from me to doubt the honest piety of the men who grubbed through life in dusty organ-lofts. Their intentions may have been of the noblest, and they may have had, for all I or anyone can know, sincere religious feeling. But they got no feeling whatever into their intolerably dreary anthems and services; and as for their intentions, the cathedrals of England might be paved with them.

Tallis has often been called "the father of English Church music." If his ghost ever wanders into our cathedral libraries, let us hope he is proud of his progeny. He, like his contemporaries, was a Catholic, and he dissembled. About his birth it has only been conjectured that he was born in the earlier part of the sixteenth century. He was organist of Waltham Abbey in 1540, and remained there till the dissolution of the monasteries, when he became a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal. He and Byrde in 1575 got a patent giving them a monopoly of the printing of music and of music paper, and they printed their own works, which it is a good thing publishers abstain from doing nowadays. In 1585 he died. He was a fine master of polyphony, and as a genuine composer is second only to Byrde. William Byrde, however, stands high above him and all other composers of the time. He was born about 1538, and died in 1623. His later life would have been full of trouble, and the noose or the flames at the stake might have terminated it, if powerful patrons had not sheltered him. The Nonconformist conscience was developing its passion for interfering in other people's private concerns. Byrde, to worship as he thought fit, and to avoid the consequences of doing it, had often to lie in hiding. But he got safely through, and composed a large quantity of splendid Church music, besides some quite unimportant secular music. His masses have a character of their own, and in his motets one finds not only a high degree of technical skill, power and sheer beauty, but also a positive white heat of passion curiously kept from breaking out. There were many others of smaller or greater importance, and the school of English religious composers, properly so called—the men who wrote true devotional music—ended with Orlando Gibbons in 1625. Since then we have had no religious musicians. The Catholic Church brought them forth, and when that Church suffered eclipse we got no more of them.

Not that music was at all eclipsed. The last great English musician was not born till more than a hundred years after the Reformation. Between Gibbons and Purcell came, amongst others, John Jenkins, Henry Lawes, Matthew Locke, Pelham Humphries, Dr. Blow, Captain Cooke and the madrigal writers. These last, however, mainly used contrivances adapted from sacred music. Some really beautiful madrigals exist, but Purcell could have done almost if not quite as well without them. During this period the old style of polyphonic music went out and the new came in. To understand the change, I beg the reader to refrain from impatience under the infliction of a few technicalities; they are a regrettable but inexorable necessity.

The old polyphonic music differed from the newer harmonic music in three respects:

1. Form and Structure.—Nearly all the important old music, the music that counts, was for voices—for chorus—with or without accompaniment. "Forms," in the modern sense of the word—cyclical forms with recurring themes arranged in regular sequence, and with development passages, etc.—of these there were none. Some composers were groping blindly after a something they wanted, but they did not hit on it. Self-sustaining musical structures, independent of words, were poor and flimsy. The form of the music that matters was determined by the words. From beginning to end of each composition voice followed voice, one singing, higher or lower, what had been sung by the others, while those others added melodies that made correct harmony. Thus a web of music was spun which has to be listened to, so to speak, horizontally and vertically—horizontally for the melodies that are sung simultaneously, and vertically for the chords that are produced by the sounding together of the notes of those melodies. When the words were used up the composition came to an end. Often the words were repeated, and repeated often; but there should be reason in all things, and the finest composers stopped when they had finished.

The tendency in the new music was to abandon the horizontal aspect. Purcell, in his additions to Playford's "Brief Introduction to the Skill of Musick," remarks on the fact that musicians now composed "to the treble, when they make counterpoint or basses to tunes or songs." Music became, broadly speaking, tunes with an accompaniment. The fugue was no contradiction of this. Even in its heyday, though the parts were ever so independent of one another, the mass of tone forms a great melody, or melos, moving on a firm harmonic foundation in the lowest part. The great choral fugues of Bach and Handel have often in the accompaniment a bass moving independently of the bass voice part, and this instrumental bass was figured so that the harmonies could be filled in, on the organ.

2. Melody.—There was fine melody enough in the old music, but its rhythm was very subtle, and there was no suggestion of catchiness in it. Melody of a familiar folk-song or dance type now came in, divided into regular periods with strongly-marked rhythms. This may be seen clearly in, for example, Morley's "ballets"—part-songs that could be danced to. Clear, easily understood, when once it came in it, never went out again. Its shaping power may be felt in the fugue subjects of Bach and Handel, as well as in their songs. This folk-song type of melody was modified during the search after expressive declamation. The ideal was to get tunes which were beautiful as tunes, and at the same time did full justice to the composer's words, to preserve the accent and full meaning of the poetry. Henry Lawes won Milton's approbation by his success in doing this, and Milton wrote:

Lawes was not always successful: when his tunes do not disregard the words they are apt to be angular.

3. Harmony.—- When a modern person first hears a piece of accompanied plainsong sung, he is generally bewildered. The beginning may trouble him and the middle worry him—the ending invariably confounds him. The thing ends in no key recognised by the modern ear. In the old days there were no keys, but modes, each with its dominant, its tonic, and proper and appropriate ending. Until comparatively recent times musicians understood this quite well; to Purcell, and to composers much later than him, the old endings were perfectly satisfactory. This, for instance, left no sense of the unfinished:

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