It is impossible to touch on more than a few characteristic examples of Purcell’s achievement There are many charming detached songs; the Harpsichord Lessons contain exquisite things There is also a quantity of unpublished sacred and secular music of high value.

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.

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 the full and perfect expression of all that was fair and sweet and healthy in this England of ours; “all thoughts, all passions, all delights,” that our English nature is capable of find a voice in his music-if only we will take the trouble to listen to it He is neglected, it is true, but he is immortal:  time is nothing:  he can wait If our age neglects him, his age neglected Shakespeare Shakespeare’s time came; Purcell’s cannot be for ever delayed.