tion 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. I should not like to have to define
the religious beliefs of any man in Charles II.'s court, but it would
seem that Purcell was religious in his way. He accepted the God of
the church as the savage accepts the God of his fath