We cannot follow Purcell’s development step by step, year by year, as we can, for instance, Beethoven’s.  When we come to survey his work as a whole, we shall be able to compare the three-part sonatas issued in 1683 with the sonatas in four parts published in the year after his death.  We shall learn that towards the end of his life he was a more magnificent master, than he was when twenty-four years old.  That is the most we can see.  We may observe ode after ode, it is true, but with regard to them we ought to be able to take into account conditions and limitations of which nothing is recorded nor can be known.  This holds, also, with regard to the theatre music.  We can merely guess at what his employers asked him to provide.  We can never know the means they placed at his disposal.  One significant thing must be noted here:  the music itself—­its style, spirit, even mannerism—­affords us no trustworthy clue as to when any particular piece may have been written.  For ages the biographical copyists have not ceased to marvel at a boy of fourteen writing the Macbeth music.  It is silly rubbish, with which I believe Purcell had nothing whatever to do.  They marvelled at the immature power latent in the music to The Libertine, which they supposed he wrote in 1676.  Alas! the date is 1692.  They marvelled still more over Dido and Aeneas, attributed to 1680.  Alas! again its date is much later—­1688 to 1690.  The evidence of style counts for little.  The truth is that in Purcell’s music there are no marked stages of development, no great changes in style.  Undoubtedly he gradually grew in power, richness of invention, fecundity of resource; but the change was one of degree, not of kind.  He never, as Beethoven did, went out to “take a new road.”  He struck what he knew to be his right road at the very beginning, and he never left it.  His nature and the point in history at which he appeared forbade that the content of his music should burst the form.  The forms he began with served him to the end.

I shall first deal with such of Purcell’s compositions as may fairly be considered as having been written before 1690.  The music for the dramas is not of an ambitious character.  It consists mainly of songs, dances, and “curtain tunes.”  In many cases half a dozen items are all that are attached to one play, and many of the pieces are brief.  Therefore that formidable-looking list of what used to be called Purcell’s “operas” does not represent anything like the quantity of music we might suppose.  Purcell wrote only one opera—­Dido.  The word “opera” had not in his day acquired a special meaning.  Spectacular plays, with songs, duets, choruses, dances, etc., were called entertainments or operas indiscriminately.  Until a few daring inquirers investigated, the world supposed Purcell to have collaborated with the playwrights.  In a few later shows it is true that he did, but some of the plays were written before he was born, some