was voluntary or not, Purcell assuredly took his place at that date.  After Purcell’s death in 1695 Dr. Blow took the position again, and retained it until his own death, in 1708.  It is also said that he resigned another place to make way for another pupil, Jeremiah Clarke.  This apparent passion or mania for resigning posts in favour of gifted pupils might easily have led to a pernicious custom amongst organists.  However, since Dr. Blow’s time the organist of Westminster Abbey has always been a more business-like person, though rarely, if ever, a fine artist.  Dr. Blow, living amongst men of such genius, caught a little—­a very little—­of Humphries’ and Purcell’s lordly manner in the writing of music; but no sweet breath of inspiration ever blew his way.  Burney, unfortunate creature, found fault with his harmonies, and these have been defended as “spots on the sun.”  As a matter of fact, the harmonies are good enough.  There are no spots—­only there is no sun.  His claim to have taught Purcell is a claim for such immortality as books give.  Purcell’s teacher will be remembered long after the composer of anthems has been crowded out of biographical dictionaries.

I have said that our knowledge of Purcell consists very largely of speculations, hypotheses and inferences.  These have led the biographers into wasting some highly moral reflections on Purcell’s early doings.  We are told, for example, that he composed music for the theatre until he became organist of Westminster Abbey, after which date he applied his energies wholly to the service of the Church.  Had the biographers not kindly followed the blind Hawkins and Burney, and hearsay generally, those reflections might have been saved for a more fitting occasion.  It was long held that Purcell wrote the incidental music for Aureng-Zebe, Epsom Wells, and The Libertine about 1676, when he was eighteen, because those plays were performed or published at that time.  It used to be said that the music, though immature, showed promise, and was indeed marvellous for so young a man.  But unless one possesses the touchstone of a true critical faculty and an intimate acquaintance with Purcell’s music and all the music of the time, one should be cautious—­one cannot be too cautious.  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