In 1691 Purcell and Dryden did King Arthur together.  The poet had by this time forsaken Monsieur Grabut, who had in his eyes at one time stood for all that was commendable in music.  Grabut was more ingenious as a business man than as a musician, but not all his ingenuity served to prevent the English discovering that he could not write pleasing tunes and that Purcell could.[1] Whether Dryden felt any difference whatever between good and bad music I cannot say:  he may have been like many of the poets, music-deaf (analogous to colour-blind).  They are said to have been good friends, which I can well believe; and Dryden, when pursued by duns and men with writs and such implements of torture, is said to have stowed himself secretly in Purcell’s room in the clock-tower of St. James’s Palace, which one may believe or not, according to the mood of the moment.  Anyhow, he seems to have been happy to work with Purcell, and for the spectacles in King Arthur they laid their two heads together and arranged some dazzling things which no one would care to see nowadays. King Arthur is almost as brilliant as Dioclesian, and contains some exceedingly patriotic songs.  The stage in England always threatens most bloodshed to England’s foes when those foes might seem to an impartial observer to be having the better of it.  Only a few years ago the heroes of the music-hall menaced the Boers with unspeakable castigations when only they could be persuaded to leave off unaccountably thrashing our generals; and when Purcell wrote “Come if you Dare,” and many another martial ditty, the time had not long passed when Van Tromp sailed up the Thames with a broom at his mast-head.  All the same, “Come if you Dare” is a fine song; “Fairest Isles, all Isles excelling,” is one of Purcell’s loveliest thoughts, and the words are more boastful than ferocious; “Saint George, the Patron of our Isle,” is brilliant and the words are innocuous.  The masque element is not dumped into King Arthur altogether so shamelessly as in other cases; the whole play is a masque.  Although there is a plot, the supernatural is largely employed, and nymphs, sirens, magicians, and what not, gave the composer notable chances.  In the first act, the scene where the Saxons sacrifice to Woden and other of their gods, is the occasion for a chain of choruses, each short but charged with the true energy divine; then comes a “battle symphony,” noisy but mild—­a sham fight with blank cartridge; and after the battle the Britons sing a “song of victory,” our acquaintance “Come if you Dare, the Trumpets Sound.”  The rest of the work is mainly enchantments and the like.  More fairy-like music has never entered a musician’s dreams than Philidel’s “Hither this way,” and the chorus which alternates with the solo part is as elfin, will-o’-th’-wispish, as anything of Mendelssohn.  Mendelssohn is Purcell’s only rival in such pictures.  At the beginning of the celebrated Frost Scene, where Cupid calls up “thou genius of the clime” (the clime being Arctic), we get a specimen of Purcell’s “word-painting”: