kindly followed the blind Hawkins and Burney, and hearsay generally,
those reflections might have been saved for a more fitting occasion. It
was long held that Purcell wrote the incidental music for _Aureng-Zebe_,
_Epsom Wells_, and _The Libertine_ about 1676, when he was eighteen,
because those plays were performed or published at that time. It used to
be said that the music, though immature, showed promise, and was indeed
marvellous for so young a man. But unless one possesses the touchstone
of a true critical faculty and an intimate acquaintance with Purcell's
music and all the music of the time, one should be cautious--one cannot
be too cautious. The music for these plays was not composed till at
least fifteen years later. The biographers had also a craze for proving
Purcell's precocity. They would have it that _Dido and Aeneas_ dated
from his twenty-second year. If they had boldly stuck to their plan of
attributing the music to the year of the first performance of the play
to which it is attached, they might easily have shown him to have been a
prolific composer before he was born. The prosaic truth is that Purcell
came before the world as a composer for the theatre in the very year of
his appointment to Westminster Abbey, and during the last five years of
his life he turned out huge quantities of music for the theatre. It is
easy to believe that his first experiments were for the Church. He was
brought up in the Church, and sang there; when his voice broke he went
on as organist. Some of his relatives and most of his friends were
Church musicians. But Church and stage were not far apart at the Court
of Charles, and, moreover, the more nearly the music of the Church
resembled that of the stage, the better the royal ears were pleased.
Pepys' soul was filled with delighted approval when he noticed the royal
hand beating the time during the anthem, and, in fact, Charles insisted
on anthems he could beat time to. Whilst "on his travels" he had
doubtless observed how much better, from his point of view, they did
these things in France. There was nothing vague or undecided in that