e confined
himself to less imposing forms, which was certainly what he was engaged
to do.

The finest example of the odes of the period is the so-called _Yorkshire
Feast Song_ (1689). Many of the others are not, for Purcell,
extraordinary. They were written for such special occasions, for
instance, as the King's return all the way to London from Windsor, or
even Newmarket, or the birthday of a Queen, and in one case the birthday
of a six-year-old Duke. They consist of overtures, songs, choruses,
etc. With one or two exceptions, the structure is Purcell's ordinary.
What that structure was we shall see (once for all) in examining some of
the later compositions, the only difference observable in the later
works being, on the whole, an increased richness and greater breadth of
scheme. They are nearly always brilliant, often incisive; there are most
lovely melodies; and there are numerous specimens of Purcell's power of
writing music, endless in its variety of outline and colour and changing
sentiment, on a ground-bass--_i.e._, a bass passage repeated over and
over again until the piece is finished. The instrumentation must have
been largely dictated by the instruments placed at his disposal, though
we must remember that in days when it was an everyday occurrence for,
say, an oboist to play from the violin part save in certain passages,
even an apparently complete score is no secure guide as to what the
composer meant, and as to how the piece was given under his direction.
This remark applies to the scoring of much of the theatre music. The
_Theatre Ayres_ contain only string parts, and it is nonsense to suppose
that in the theatre of that time Purcell had only strings to write for.
Purcell wrote in all twenty-two sonatas--twelve in three parts, ten in
four. So far as the number of parts is concerned, there is little real
difference. In the three-part works one stave serves for both the string
bass-player and the harpsichordist; in the four-part ones there are two
separate staves, with trifling variations in the two parts. The twelve
three-part sonatas were issued, as has been said, in 1683. They are
pure, self-sustaining music, detached from words and scenic
arrangements; nothing approaching them had been written by an
Englishman, nor anything so fine by an Italian. Indeed, in their own
particular way they are matched only by the composer's own four-part
sonatas published after his death. We must not look for anything like