As a child, between a flighty mother and a father verging to insanity from caprice, he had grown up with ideas of filial duty perplexed, and with a fitful love for either, that was not attachment:  a baffled natural love, that in teaching us to brood on the hardness of our lot, lays the foundation for a perniciously mystical self-love.  He had waged precociously philosophic, when still a junior.  His father had kept him by his side, giving him no profession beyond that of the obedient expectant son and heir.  His first allusion to the youth’s dependency had provoked their first breach, which had been widened by many an ostentatious forgiveness on the one hand, and a dumbly-protesting submission on the other.  His mother died away from her husband’s roof.  The old man then sought to obliterate her utterly.  She left her boy a little money, and the injunction of his father was, that he was never to touch it.  He inherited his taste for music from her, and his father vowed, that if ever he laid hand upon a musical instrument again, he would be disinherited.  All these signs of a vehement spiteful antagonism to reason, the young man might have treated more as his father’s misfortune than his own, if he could only have brought himself to acknowledge that such a thing as madness stigmatized his family.  But the sentimental mind conceived it as ‘monstrous impiety’ to bring this accusation against a parent who did not break windows, or grin to deformity.  He behaved toward him as to a reasonable person, and felt the rebellious rancour instead of the pity.  Thus sentiment came in the way of pity.  By degrees, Sir Purcell transferred all his father’s madness to the Fates by whom he was persecuted.  There was evidently madness somewhere, as his shuddering human nature told him.  It did not offend his sentiment to charge this upon the order of the universe.

Against such a wild-hitting madness, or concentrated ire of the superior Powers, Sir Purcell stood up, taking blow upon blow.  As organist of Hillford Church, he brushed his garments, and put a polish on his apparel, with an energetic humility that looked like unconquerable patience; as though he had said:  “While life is left in me, I will be seen for what I am.”  We will vary it—­“For what I think myself.”  In reality, he fought no battle.  He had been dead-beaten from his boyhood.  Like the old Spanish Governor, the walls of whose fortress had been thrown down by an earthquake, and who painted streets to deceive the enemy, he was rendered safe enough by his astuteness, except against a traitor from within.

One who goes on doggedly enduring, doggedly doing his best, must subsist on comfort of a kind that is likely to be black comfort.  The mere piping of the musical devil shall not suffice.  In Sir Purcell’s case, it had long seemed a magnanimity to him that he should hold to a life so vindictively scourged, and his comfort was that he had it at his own disposal.  To know so much, to suffer, and still to refrain, flattered his pride.  “The term of my misery is in my hand,” he said, softened by the reflection.  It is our lowest philosophy.