kind of composers they were we can with sorrow see in the music they
wrote; what skill as executants they possessed we may judge from the
music they played and the beggarly organs they played on. We read of our
"great Church musicians"--but these men were not musicians; and of the
rich stores of Church music--but, however vast its quantity, it is not,
properly speaking, music. The great English musicians who wrote for the
Church before Purcell's time were Tallis, Byrde, Whyte, Orlando Gibbons,
and they composed not for the English, but for the Roman Church. When I
say that Pelham Humphries and Purcell were not religious at all, but
purely secular composers, thoroughly pagan in spirit, I imply--or, if
you like, exply--that the Church of England has had no religious
musicians worth mentioning. Far be it from me to doubt the honest piety
of the men who grubbed through life in dusty organ-lofts. Their
intentions may have been of the noblest, and they may have had, for all
I or anyone can know, sincere religious feeling. But they got no feeling
whatever into their intolerably dreary anthems and services; and as for
their intentions, the cathedrals of England might be paved with them.

Tallis has often been called "the father of English Church music." If
his ghost ever wanders into our cathedral libraries, let us hope he is
proud of his progeny. He, like his contemporaries, was a Catholic, and
he dissembled. About his birth it has only been conjectured that he was
born in the earlier part of the sixteenth century. He was organist of
Waltham Abbey in 1540, and remained there till the dissolution of the
monasteries, when he became a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal. He and
Byrde in 1575 got a patent giving them a monopoly of the printing of
music and of music paper, and they printed their own works, which it is
a good thing publishers abstain from doing nowadays. In 1585 he died. He
was a fine master of polyphony, and as a genuine composer is second only
to Byrde. William Byrde, however, stands high above him and all other