We proceed to sketch the history of the other branches of the art in England, and commence at once with Henry Purcell, the greatest of our native masters, previously to whom music is said to have been manifestly on the decline during the seventeenth century.  It has been often remarked of Purcell, that he had “devance son siecle.”  Many of his faults, defects, or crudities, may undoubtedly be attributed to the age which he adorned.  The tide of public approbation has of late set strongly in his favour; and could the fulsome panegyrics, of which he has been the object, be implicitly received, Purcell would be considered as nothing less than a prodigy of genius.  Several attempts at dramatic music had been made before Purcell’s time.  Matthew Lock had already set the songs of Macbeth and the Tempest, and had also given to the world “The English Opera, or the vocal music in Psyche,” in close imitation of Lulli, the long famed composer of Louis XIV.  Purcell followed in the new track, taking for his models the productions of the first Italian composers.  The fact, that Purcell was under obligations to the Italians, may startle many of his modern admirers; but with a candour worthy of himself, in the dedication of his Dioclesian to Charles Duke of Somerset, he says, that “music is yet but in its nonage, a forward child.  ’Tis now learning Italian, which is its best master.”  And in the preface to his Sonatas, he tells us that he “faithfully endeavoured at a just imitation of the most famed Italian masters.”  An able critic has also remarked, that he thinks he can perceive the obligations which Purcell had to Carissimi in his recitative, and to Lulli both in recitative and melody; and also that it appears that he was fond of Stradella’s manner, though he seems never to have pillaged his passages.  Many of our readers are doubtless aware, that Purcell’s opera of King Arthur has been lately revived at Drury-Lane, where it has had a considerable run.  The public prints have been loud in its praise; and this work has been styled “the perfect model of the lyric drama of England.”  The intervention of spoken dialogue, by many in their innocence hitherto supposed to be a defect in the construction of a musical drama, is strangely metamorphosed into a beauty in King Arthur.  In short, from some of these critiques, King Arthur would appear to be the only perfect drama or opera which the world has ever seen.  To show the real value of these criticisms, we may mention the fact, that in an elaborate article of a journal now before us, in which many of the pieces of this opera are enumerated and highly commended, the writer has curiously enough passed by in silence two airs, of which Dr Burney observes that they contain not a single passage which the best composers of his time, if it presented itself to their imagination, would reject; and on one of which he also remarks, that it is “one of the few airs