es the pervading atmosphere is sustained. One would
say that Purcell got his inspiration by reading of Prospero's magic
island, and never thought of Shadwell's stupid and boorish travesty.

The atmosphere of _The Fairy Queen_ is not, to my mind, so richly
odorous, so charged with the mystery and colour of pure nature, as that
of _The Tempest_; but Purcell has certainly caught the patter of fairy
footsteps and woven gossamer textures of melody. The score was lost for
a couple of centuries, and turned up in the library of the Royal Academy
of Music. In spite of being old-fashioned, it was not sufficiently out
of date to remain there; so Mr. Shedlock edited it, and it has been
published. _The Indian Queen_ and _Bonduca_ stand badly in need of
careful editing--not in the spirit of one editor of _King Arthur_ who,
while declaring that he had altered nothing, stated that he had altered
some passages to make them sound better. _The Indian Queen_ contains the
recitative "Ye twice ten hundred deities" and the song "By the croaking
of the toad."

Purcell's forms are not highly organised. There are fugues, canons,
exercises on a ground-bass, and many numbers are dances planned in much
the same way as other people's dances, and songs differing only in their
quality from folk-songs. Of form, as we use the word--meaning the
clean-cut form perfected by Haydn--I have already asserted that there is
none. This absence of form is held to be a defect by those who regard
the Haydn form as an ideal--an ideal which had to be realised before
there could be any music at all, properly speaking. But those of us who
are not antediluvian academics know that form (in that sense) is not an
end, but a means of managing and holding together one's material. In
Purcell's music it is not needed. The torrent of music flowing from his
brain made its own bed and banks as it went. Without modern form he
wrote beautiful, perfectly satisfying music, which remains everlastingly
modern. Neither did he feel the want of the mode of thematic development
which we find at its ripest in Beethoven. As I have described in
discussing the three-part sonatas, in movements that are not dances his
invention is its own guide, though we may note that he employed
imitation pretty constantly to knit the texture of the music close and
tight. Many of the slow openings of the overture are antiphonal,
passages sometimes being echoed, and sometimes a passage is continued by
being rep