When Purcell died, on November 21, 1695, he was busy with the music for Tom d’Urfey’s Don Quixote (part iii.), being helped by one Eccles, who enjoyed a certain mild fame in his day.  The last song, “set in his sicknesse,” was a song supposed to be sung by a mad woman, “From rosy bowers.”  The recitative is magnificent; two of the sections in tempo are fine, especially the second; the last portion is meant to depict raving lunacy, and does so.  It is by no means one of Purcell’s greatest efforts, and he apparently had no notion of making a dramatic exit from this world.  If the doctors knew what disease killed him, they never told.  The professional libeller of the dead, Hawkins, speaks of dissipations and late hours:  and he would have us believe that he left his family in poverty.  As a matter of fact, Mrs. Purcell was left quite well off, and was able to give her son Edward a good education.  She had also property to bequeath when she died in 1706.  Purcell worked so hard that he cannot have had time for the life of tavern-rioting that Hawkins invented.  All we know is that he died, and that his death was a tragic loss to England.  A few days later he was buried in Westminster Abbey, to the sound of his own most solemn music.  A tablet to his memory was placed near the grave, and the inscription on it is said to have been written by the wife of Sir Robert Howard, author of the Indian Queen and other forgotten master-works.  The light of English music had gone out, though few at the moment realised it, for Dr. Blow and Eccles and others went on composing music which was thought very good.  But the light had gone, and it was not Handel who extinguished it.  Handel did not come to England for fifteen years, and during that fifteen years not a single composition worthy of being placed within measurable distance of Purcell’s average work fell from an English pen.  Purcell was by no means forgotten all at once.  The four-part sonatas were issued in 1697, the Harpsichord Lessons in 1696; the Choice Ayres for the Theatre—­selections from the stage music—­came out in 1697; the first book of the Orpheus Britannicus appeared in 1698, and a second edition of it in 1706; the second book of the same appeared in 1702, and a second edition in 1711; while a third edition of both books was published as late as 1721, when Handel had been settled in England some years.  The fame of our last great musician survived him for quite a long time, as things go.  That the re-issue of his works was not due alone to the energy of his widow is clear, for she died in 1706.