ss, and the Cantiones Sacrae, and carefully study such
numbers as the "Agnus Dei" of the former and the profound "Tristitia
et anxietas" in the latter.

The learned branch of the English school reached its climax. Meantime
another branch, not unlearned, but caring less for scholastic
perfection than for perfect expression of poetic sentiment, was fast
growing. The history of the masque is a stale matter, so I will merely
mention that Campion, and many another with, before, and after him,
engaged during a great part of their lives in what can only be called
the manufacture of these entertainments. A masque was simply a
gorgeous show of secular ritual, of colour and of music--a kind of
Drury Lane melodrama in fact, but as far removed from Drury Lane as
this age is from that in the widespread faculty of appreciating
beauty. The music consisted of tunes of a popular outline and
sentiment, but they were dragged into the province of art by the
incapacity of those who wrote or adapted them to touch anything
without leaving it lovelier than when they lighted on it. Pages might
be, and I daresay some day will be, written about Dr. Campion's
melody, its beauty and power, the unique sense of rhythmic subtleties
which it shows, and withal its curiously English quality. But one
important thing we must observe: it is wholly secular melody. Even
when written in the ecclesiastical modes, it has no, or the very
slightest, ecclesiastical tinge. It is folk-melody with its face
washed and hair combed; it bears the same relation to English
folk-melody as a chorale from the "Matthew" Passion bears to its
original. Another important point is this: whereas the church
composers took a few Latin sentences and made no endeavour to treat
them so as to make sense in the singing, but made the words wait upon
the musical phrases, in Dr. Campion we see the first clear wish to
weld music and poem into one flawless whole. To an extent he
succeeded, but full success did not come till several generations had
first tried, tried and failed. Campion properly belongs to the
sixteenth century, and Harry Lawes, born twenty-five years before
Campion died, as properly belongs to the seventeenth century. In his
songs we find even more marked the determination that words and music
shall go hand in hand--that the words shall no longer be dragged at
the cart-tail of the melody, so to say. In fact, a main objection
against Lawes--and a true one in many instances--is