indeed it is one of the most poignantly sorrowful and exquisitely beautiful songs ever composed.  There are plenty of rollicking tunes, too, and the dance-pieces—­with the dancers—­are exhilarating and admirable for their purpose.  The musicianship is as masterly as Purcell ever displayed.  If Purcell composed the work before he was twenty-two he worked a miracle; and even if the date is ten years later it stands as a wonderful achievement.  If we ask why he did not produce more real operas, there can be only one answer:  the town did not care for them.  The town went crazy over spectacular shows; even Dryden yielded to the town’s taste; and there is no sign that Purcell cherished any particular private passion for opera as opera.  He did his best for his paymaster.  If there is no evidence hinting at his despising posterity, like Charles Lamb, or at any determination, also like Lamb, to write for antiquity, there is in his anthems and odes very considerable evidence that he was ready to write what his paymaster wanted written.  We must bear in mind that downright bad taste, such as our present-day taste for such artistic infamies as the “Girls of This” and the “Belles of That,” had not come into existence in Purcell’s time.  Purcell’s contemporaries preferred his music to all other for the same reason that we prefer it to all other of his time—­it was the best.

Dido, in pianoforte score, is generally accessible; only a few of the spoken play sets are as yet published, and they are ridiculously expensive.  Let us not repine and give up hope.  Some day that unheard-of thing an intelligent music publisher may be born into the world, and he may give Englishmen a trustworthy edition, at a fair price, of the works of England’s greatest musician.  Meantime, the reader must do as the writer did for some years—­he must grub and laboriously copy in the British Museum, buying, when he can, the seventeenth-century edition of Dioclesian and the eighteenth-century editions of such works as The Tempest and The Indian Queen, and also the Orpheus Britannicus.  To penetrate to Purcell’s intention, to understand with what skill and force the intention is carried out, a knowledge of the music alone hardly suffices.  I would not advise anything so terrible as an endeavour to read the whole of the plays, but at least Boadicca, The Indian Queen, The Tempest, The Fairy Queen, Dioclesian and King Arthur must be read; and it is worth while making an effort especially to grasp all the details of the masques.  For themselves, few of the plays are worth reading; and, unluckily, the best of them have the least significant music.  The others are neither serious plays nor good honest comedy; and a malicious fate willed that the very versions for which Purcell’s aid was required were the worst of all—­what little sense there was in the bad plays was destroyed when they were made into “operas” or “entertainments”—­spectacular