of splendid Church music, besides some quite unimportant secular music.  His masses have a character of their own, and in his motets one finds not only a high degree of technical skill, power and sheer beauty, but also a positive white heat of passion curiously kept from breaking out.  There were many others of smaller or greater importance, and the school of English religious composers, properly so called—­the men who wrote true devotional music—­ended with Orlando Gibbons in 1625.  Since then we have had no religious musicians.  The Catholic Church brought them forth, and when that Church suffered eclipse we got no more of them.

Not that music was at all eclipsed.  The last great English musician was not born till more than a hundred years after the Reformation.  Between Gibbons and Purcell came, amongst others, John Jenkins, Henry Lawes, Matthew Locke, Pelham Humphries, Dr. Blow, Captain Cooke and the madrigal writers.  These last, however, mainly used contrivances adapted from sacred music.  Some really beautiful madrigals exist, but Purcell could have done almost if not quite as well without them.  During this period the old style of polyphonic music went out and the new came in.  To understand the change, I beg the reader to refrain from impatience under the infliction of a few technicalities; they are a regrettable but inexorable necessity.

The old polyphonic music differed from the newer harmonic music in three respects: 

1. Form and Structure.—­Nearly all the important old music, the music that counts, was for voices—­for chorus—­with or without accompaniment.  “Forms,” in the modern sense of the word—­cyclical forms with recurring themes arranged in regular sequence, and with development passages, etc.—­of these there were none.  Some composers were groping blindly after a something they wanted, but they did not hit on it.  Self-sustaining musical structures, independent of words, were poor and flimsy.  The form of the music that matters was determined by the words.  From beginning to end of each composition voice followed voice, one singing, higher or lower, what had been sung by the others, while those others added melodies that made correct harmony.  Thus a web of music was spun which has to be listened to, so to speak, horizontally and vertically—­horizontally for the melodies that are sung simultaneously, and vertically for the chords that are produced by the sounding together of the notes of those melodies.  When the words were used up the composition came to an end.  Often the words were repeated, and repeated often; but there should be reason in all things, and the finest composers stopped when they had finished.