for the Church.  He was brought up in the Church, and sang there; when his voice broke he went on as organist.  Some of his relatives and most of his friends were Church musicians.  But Church and stage were not far apart at the Court of Charles, and, moreover, the more nearly the music of the Church resembled that of the stage, the better the royal ears were pleased.  Pepys’ soul was filled with delighted approval when he noticed the royal hand beating the time during the anthem, and, in fact, Charles insisted on anthems he could beat time to.  Whilst “on his travels” he had doubtless observed how much better, from his point of view, they did these things in France.  There was nothing vague or undecided in that curious mind.  He knew perfectly well what he liked, and insisted on having it.  He disliked the old Catholic music; he disliked quite as much Puritan psalm-singing—­that abominable cacophony which to-day is called “hearty congregational singing.”  He wanted jolly Church music, sung in time and in tune; he wanted secular, not sacred, music in church.  But his taste, though secular, was not corrupt—­the music-hall Church music and Salvation Army tunes of to-day would probably have outraged his feelings.  His taste coincided with Purcell’s own.  Along with some of the old-fashioned genuine devotional music, Purcell must have heard from childhood a good deal of the stamp he was destined to write; he must often have taken his part in Church music that might, with perfect propriety, have been given in a theatre.  All things were ripe for a secular composer; the mood that found utterance in the old devotional music was a dead thing, and in England Humphries had pointed the new way.  Purcell was that secular composer.

One spirit, the secular, pagan spirit, breathes in every bar of Purcell’s music.  Mid-Victorian critics and historians deplored the resemblance between the profane style of the stage pieces and the sacred style of the anthems and services.  Not resemblance, but identity, is the word to use.  There is no distinguishing between the two styles.  There are not two styles:  there is one style—­the secular style, Purcell’s style.  Let us pause a moment, and ask ourselves if any great composer has ever had more than one style.  Put aside the fifth-rate imitators who now copied Mozart, and now Palestrina, and could therefore write in as many styles as there were styles to copy, and not one of them their own.  There is no difference between the sacred motets and the secular madrigals of the early polyphonists.  Bach did not use dance-measures in his Church music, but in the absence of these lies the entire distinction between his Church and his secular compositions; the structure, manner and outlines of his songs are precisely alike—­indeed, he dished up secular airs for sacred cantatas.  The style of Handel’s “Semele” and that of his “Samson” are the same; there is no dissimilarity between Haydn’s symphonies and the “Creation”; Mozart’s symphonies and his masses (though the masses are a little breezier, on the whole); Schubert’s symphonies or songs and his masses or “The Song of Miriam”; Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and the great Mass in D.