personal, comes the career of
Georges de la Hele, who, being a priest, gave up his lucrative benefice
to wed the woman he wished.

And yet again with disconcerting effect comes the story of Ambrosio de
Cotes, who was a gambler and a drunkard, who kept a mistress, and was
rebuked publicly for howling indecent refrains to the tunes in church.
Which of these is fairly typical as a musician?

Then comes the most notable man in all English music, Harry Purcell,
who wrote the best love-songs that ever melted the reserve of his race.
He must have been a good husband, and his married life a happy one,
seeing how ardent his wife was for his memory, and how she celebrated
him in a memorial volume, as the Orpheus of Great Britain, and how
eager she was that the two sons that survived out of their six
children, should be trained to music.

And speaking of types, what shall we say of this cloud of witnesses,
bearing the most honoured name in music, the name of Bach?

There were more than twenty-five Bachs, who made themselves names as
makers of harmony, and they earned themselves almost as great names as
family makers; all except Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, who was as lacking
in virtue as he was abundant in virtuosity. He was notoriously immoral,
and yet the greatest organist of his time, as his father had been
before him; and it was this father, Johann Sebastian Bach, who by his
life and preeminence in music, offers the biggest obstacle to any
theory about the immoral influences of the art. For surely, if he, who
is generally called the greatest of musicians, led a life of hardly
equalled domesticity, it will not be easy to claim that music has an
unsettling effect upon society. And yet there are his great rivals,
Handel and Beethoven, whose careers are in the remotest possible
contrast.

It is neither here nor there, that "Father" Bach left little money and
many children when he died, and that the sons seized upon his MSS. and
drifted away to other cities, leaving the mother and three daughters to
live upon the charity of the town. It is unfortunate to have to include
among the ungrateful children the stepson, Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach,
who seems otherwise to have been a pleasant enough fellow, a fair
family man, and a great composer. He first too much eclipsed his
father's fame, and has since been too much eclipsed thereby. He had
family troubles, too, and left a wife and children to mourn him. So
much for the Bachs.

A fami