ious. The music for these plays was not composed till at
least fifteen years later. The biographers had also a craze for proving
Purcell's precocity. They would have it that _Dido and Aeneas_ dated
from his twenty-second year. If they had boldly stuck to their plan of
attributing the music to the year of the first performance of the play
to which it is attached, they might easily have shown him to have been a
prolific composer before he was born. The prosaic truth is that Purcell
came before the world as a composer for the theatre in the very year of
his appointment to Westminster Abbey, and during the last five years of
his life he turned out huge quantities of music for the theatre. It is
easy to believe that his first experiments were for the Church. He was
brought up in the Church, and sang there; when his voice broke he went
on as organist. Some of his relatives and most of his friends were
Church musicians. But Church and stage were not far apart at the Court
of Charles, and, moreover, the more nearly the music of the Church
resembled that of the stage, the better the royal ears were pleased.
Pepys' soul was filled with delighted approval when he noticed the royal
hand beating the time during the anthem, and, in fact, Charles insisted
on anthems he could beat time to. Whilst "on his travels" he had
doubtless observed how much better, from his point of view, they did
these things in France. There was nothing vague or undecided in that
curious mind. He knew perfectly well what he liked, and insisted on
having it. He disliked the old Catholic music; he disliked quite as much
Puritan psalm-singing--that abominable cacophony which to-day is called
"hearty congregational singing." He wanted jolly Church music, sung in
time and in tune; he wanted secular, not sacred, music in church. But
his taste, though secular, was not corrupt--the music-hall Church music
and Salvation Army tunes of to-day would probably have outraged his
feelings. His taste coincided with Purcell's own. Along with some of the
old-fashioned genuine devotional music, Purcell must have heard from
childhood a good deal of the stamp he was destined to write; he must
often have taken his part in Church music that might, with perfect
propriety, have been given in a theatre. All things were ripe for a
secular composer; the mood that found utterance in the old devotional
music was a dead thing, and in England Humphries had pointed the new
way. Purcell was that