It is indeed mournful to contemplate the havoc disease and death play with the might-have-beens of men and of causes.  Pelham Humphries, an unmistakable genius, was carried away at twenty-seven; Henry Purcell, one of the mightiest of the world’s masters of music, died at the age of thirty-seven, only two years older than his peer in genius, Mozart.  Yet he left a glorious record, and his days must have been glorious.  Men like Purcell do not create music such as theirs by blind instinct, as a cat catches mice.  A mighty brain and mightier heart must have worked with passionate energy, the fires must have burnt at an unbroken white heat, to produce so much unsurpassable music in so short a time.  The qualities we find in the music were in him before they got into the music; all that we can enjoy he enjoyed first.  He had, too, a high destiny to work out, and he knew it.  Thomas Tudway said he was ambitious to exceed everyone of his time.  To the last he laboured unceasingly, and if he died, as has been suspected, of consumption, there is no trace of the fever of ill-health nor any morbidness in his creations.  They are charged with energy—­often elemental, volcanic energy that nothing can resist; and at its lowest, the energy is the energy of robust health and a keen appetite.  That energy carried him far beyond the modest goal he thought of, exceeding his fellows.  He won the topmost heights within the reach of man.  The old polyphonists he never tried to rival, but in the style of music he wrote no composer has gone or can go higher than he.  A wiseacre has said that he left a sterile monument.  It may be that monuments in the British Museum blow and blossom and reproduce their kind:  outside they do not.  If the wiseacre meant that Purcell did not leave, as Haydn and Mozart undoubtedly did, a form in which dullards may compose until the world is sick, then the wiseacre is right But the inventors and perfecters of forms have not always wrought an unmitigated good.  If Haydn left a fruitful monument in the symphony, and Handel in his particular form of oratorio, and if we thankfully praise Haydn and Handel for these their benefits, must we not also blame Haydn for the dull symphonies that nearly drove Schumann and Wagner mad, and Handel for the countless copies of his oratorios that rendered stupid, dull, and insensible to the beauty of music those generations that have attended our great musical festivals?  The spirit of Purcell’s work and its technique did not die with Purcell:  the spirit of much of Handel’s music, and certainly of his masterpiece, Israel in Egypt, is Purcell’s; and eighteenth-century contrapuntist though Handel was, much of his technique came from Purcell.  Rightly regarded, Purcell’s monument is anything but sterile.  Felix Mottl, worried to exasperation by stale laments for Mozart’s premature death, once lifted up his voice and thanked God for Mozart, the Heaven-sent man.  In the same spirit we may be thankful for Purcell.  In his music we have