structure, manner and outlines of his songs are precisely alike--indeed,
he dished up secular airs for sacred cantatas. The style of Handel's
"Semele" and that of his "Samson" are the same; there is no
dissimilarity between Haydn's symphonies and the "Creation"; Mozart's
symphonies and his masses (though the masses are a little breezier, on
the whole); Schubert's symphonies or songs and his masses or "The Song
of Miriam"; Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and the great Mass in D.

Purcell's style is largely a sort of fusion of all the styles in vogue
in his lifetime. The old polyphonic music he knew, and he was a master
of polyphonic writing; but with him it was only a means to the carrying
out of a scheme very unlike any the old writers ever thought of--the
interest of each separate part is not greater than the general harmonic
interest. Then, as he admitted, he learnt a great deal from the
Italians. From Lulli, through Humphries, he got declamatory freedom in
the bonds of definite forms, not letting the poet's or the Bible words
warp his music out of all reasonable shape. The outlines of his tunes
show unmistakably the influence of English folk-song and folk-dance.
There was an immense amount of household music in those days--catches,
ballads, songs and dances. The folk-songs, even if they were invented
before the birth of the modern key-sense, were soon modified by it: very
few indications can be found of their having originated in the epoch
when the modes had the domination; and the same is true of the dances.
The sum of these influences, plus Purcell's innate tendencies, was a
style "apt" (in the phraseology of the day) either for Church, Court,
theatre, or tavern--a style whose combined loftiness, directness, and
simplicity passed unobserved for generations while the big "bow-wow"
manner of Handel was held to be the only manner tolerable in great
music.