The learned branch of the English school reached its climax.  Meantime another branch, not unlearned, but caring less for scholastic perfection than for perfect expression of poetic sentiment, was fast growing.  The history of the masque is a stale matter, so I will merely mention that Campion, and many another with, before, and after him, engaged during a great part of their lives in what can only be called the manufacture of these entertainments.  A masque was simply a gorgeous show of secular ritual, of colour and of music—­a kind of Drury Lane melodrama in fact, but as far removed from Drury Lane as this age is from that in the widespread faculty of appreciating beauty.  The music consisted of tunes of a popular outline and sentiment, but they were dragged into the province of art by the incapacity of those who wrote or adapted them to touch anything without leaving it lovelier than when they lighted on it.  Pages might be, and I daresay some day will be, written about Dr. Campion’s melody, its beauty and power, the unique sense of rhythmic subtleties which it shows, and withal its curiously English quality.  But one important thing we must observe:  it is wholly secular melody.  Even when written in the ecclesiastical modes, it has no, or the very slightest, ecclesiastical tinge.  It is folk-melody with its face washed and hair combed; it bears the same relation to English folk-melody as a chorale from the “Matthew” Passion bears to its original.  Another important point is this:  whereas the church composers took a few Latin sentences and made no endeavour to treat them so as to make sense in the singing, but made the words wait upon the musical phrases, in Dr. Campion we see the first clear wish to weld music and poem into one flawless whole.  To an extent he succeeded, but full success did not come till several generations had first tried, tried and failed.  Campion properly belongs to the sixteenth century, and Harry Lawes, born twenty-five years before Campion died, as properly belongs to the seventeenth century.  In his songs we find even more marked the determination that words and music shall go hand in hand—­that the words shall no longer be dragged at the cart-tail of the melody, so to say.  In fact, a main objection against Lawes—­and a true one in many instances—­is that he sacrificed the melody rather than the meaning of the poem.  This is significant.  The Puritans are held to have damaged church music less by burning the choir-books and pawning the organ-pipes than by insisting (as we may say) on One word one note.  As a matter of fact, this was not exclusively a plank in the political platform of the Puritans.  The Loyalist Campion, the Loyalist Lawes, and many another Loyalist insisted on it.  Even when they did not write a note to each word, they took care not to have long roulades (divisions) on unimportant words, but to derive the accent of the music from that of the poem.  This showed mainly two tendencies:  first, one towards expression of poetic feeling and