shows.  Dryden was the best of the playwrights he was doomed to work with, and in King Arthur Dryden forgot about the aim and purpose of high drama, and concocted a hobgoblin pantomime interlarded with bravado concerning the greatness of Britain and Britons. Dioclesian, the first of Purcell’s great theatre achievements, is even more stupid.  The original play was The Prophetess of Beaumont and Fletcher, straightforward Elizabethan stodge and fustian:  and if Betterton, who chose to maltreat it, was bent on making the very worst play ever written, it must be conceded that his success was nearly complete.  It gets down to the plane of pure and sparkling idiocy that the world admires in, say, “The Merry Widow.”  Yet the masque afforded him opportunities of which he made splendid use.  The overture is a noble piece of workmanship.  There is a Handelian dignity without any bow-wow or stiffness, and the freshness and freedom are of a kind that Handel never attained to.  Of course, it has no connection with the drama:  it would serve for many another play just as well.  What the theatre manager demanded of Purcell was a piece of music to occupy the audience before the curtain went up; and Purcell wrote it.  There are songs and dances of a rare quality, and the biggest thing of all is the chorus, “Let all rehearse,” which rivals Handel’s “Fixed in his everlasting seat,” a plain copy of it, down to many small points.  Those who say Purcell had no influence upon his successors evidently know little either of Purcell’s music or Handel’s.  Handel owed much to Purcell, and not least was the massive, direct way of dealing with the chorus, the very characteristic which has kept his oratorios so popular here and so unpopular abroad.  Handel’s mighty choral effects are English:  he learnt from Purcell how to make them.  It is true enough that Purcell learnt something from Carissimi; but Carissimi’s effects are very often of that kind that look better on paper than they sound in performance.  The variations over ground-basses are marvellously ingenious, but more marvellous than the ingenuity are the charming delicacy and expressiveness of the melodies woven in the upper parts.  They are music which appeals direct to listeners who care nothing for technical problems.  Some of the discords may sound a little odd to those who have been trained to regard the harmonic usages of the Viennese school as the standard of perfection.  Dr. Burney thought them blunders resulting from an imperfect technique.  Later a few words must be said on the subject, but let me for the present point out that Purcell was a master of the theory as well as of the practice of composition.  He loved these discords, and deliberately wrote them; he could have justified them, and there is hardly one that we cannot justify.  Purcell could write intricate fugues and canons without any “harsh progressions”; that he liked these for their own sake is obvious in numberless pieces where no laws of counterpoint compelled him to write this note rather than that.  And though in the eyes of the theorists they are harsh, in the ears of all men they are sweet.  The works of Purcell and of Mozart are the sweetest music ever composed, yet both composers filled their music with discords—­“that give delight and hurt not.”