composers of the time. He was born about 1538, and died in 1623. His
later life would have been full of trouble, and the noose or the flames
at the stake might have terminated it, if powerful patrons had not
sheltered him. The Nonconformist conscience was developing its passion
for interfering in other people's private concerns. Byrde, to worship as
he thought fit, and to avoid the consequences of doing it, had often to
lie in hiding. But he got safely through, and composed a large quantity
of splendid Church music, besides some quite unimportant secular music.
His masses have a character of their own, and in his motets one finds
not only a high degree of technical skill, power and sheer beauty, but
also a positive white heat of passion curiously kept from breaking out.
There were many others of smaller or greater importance, and the school
of English religious composers, properly so called--the men who wrote
true devotional music--ended with Orlando Gibbons in 1625. Since then we
have had no religious musicians. The Catholic Church brought them forth,
and when that Church suffered eclipse we got no more of them.

Not that music was at all eclipsed. The last great English musician was
not born till more than a hundred years after the Reformation. Between
Gibbons and Purcell came, amongst others, John Jenkins, Henry Lawes,
Matthew Locke, Pelham Humphries, Dr. Blow, Captain Cooke and the
madrigal writers. These last, however, mainly used contrivances adapted
from sacred music. Some really beautiful madrigals exist, but Purcell
could have done almost if not quite as well without them. During this
period the old style of polyphonic music went out and the new came in.
To understand the change, I beg the reader to refrain from impatience
under the infliction of a few technicalities; they are a regrettable
but inexorable necessity.

The old polyphonic music differed from the newer harmonic music in three