Purcell, then, was the last of the English musicians.  So fair and sweet a morning saw the end that many good folk have regarded the end as the beginning, as only the promise of an opulent summer day.  How glorious the day might have been had Purcell lived, no one can say; but he died, and no great genius has arisen since.  As for the cathedral organists who followed him chronologically, the less said about them the better.  What kind of composers they were we can with sorrow see in the music they wrote; what skill as executants they possessed we may judge from the music they played and the beggarly organs they played on.  We read of our “great Church musicians”—­but these men were not musicians; and of the rich stores of Church music—­but, however vast its quantity, it is not, properly speaking, music.  The great English musicians who wrote for the Church before Purcell’s time were Tallis, Byrde, Whyte, Orlando Gibbons, and they composed not for the English, but for the Roman Church.  When I say that Pelham Humphries and Purcell were not religious at all, but purely secular composers, thoroughly pagan in spirit, I imply—­or, if you like, exply—­that the Church of England has had no religious musicians worth mentioning.  Far be it from me to doubt the honest piety of the men who grubbed through life in dusty organ-lofts.  Their intentions may have been of the noblest, and they may have had, for all I or anyone can know, sincere religious feeling.  But they got no feeling whatever into their intolerably dreary anthems and services; and as for their intentions, the cathedrals of England might be paved with them.

Tallis has often been called “the father of English Church music.”  If his ghost ever wanders into our cathedral libraries, let us hope he is proud of his progeny.  He, like his contemporaries, was a Catholic, and he dissembled.  About his birth it has only been conjectured that he was born in the earlier part of the sixteenth century.  He was organist of Waltham Abbey in 1540, and remained there till the dissolution of the monasteries, when he became a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal.  He and Byrde in 1575 got a patent giving them a monopoly of the printing of music and of music paper, and they printed their own works, which it is a good thing publishers abstain from doing nowadays.  In 1585 he died.  He was a fine master of polyphony, and as a genuine composer is second only to Byrde.  William Byrde, however, stands high above him and all other composers of the time.  He was born about 1538, and died in 1623.  His later life would have been full of trouble, and the noose or the flames at the stake might have terminated it, if powerful patrons had not sheltered him.  The Nonconformist conscience was developing its passion for interfering in other people’s private concerns.  Byrde, to worship as he thought fit, and to avoid the consequences of doing it, had often to lie in hiding.  But he got safely through, and composed a large quantity