verse observed rules which Chaucer never dreamed of, because, to drag
in Artemus Ward once again, the poetaster's spelling conformed more
nearly to ours than Chaucer's!

The Mass is indeed noble and stately, but it is miraculously
expressive as well. Its expressiveness is the thing that strikes one
more forcibly every time one hears it. At first one feels chiefly its
old-world freshness--not the picturesque spring freshness of Purcell
and Handel, but a freshness that is sweet and grave and cool, coming
out of the Elizabethan days when life, at its fastest, went
deliberately, and was lived in many-gabled houses with trees and
gardens, or in great palaces with pleasant courtyards, and the Thames
ran unpolluted to the sea, and the sun shone daily even in London, and
all things were fair and clean. It is old-world music, yet it stands
nearer to us than most of the music written in and immediately after
Handel's period, the period of dry formalism and mere arithmetic.
There is not a sign of the formal melodic outlines which we recognise
at once in any piece out of the contrapuntal time, not an indication
that the Academic, "classical," unpoetic, essay-writing eighteenth
century was coming. The formal outlines had not been invented, for
rules and themes that would work without breaking the rules were
little thought of. Byrde evades the rules in the frankest manner: in
this Mass alone there are scores of evasions that would have been
inevitably condemned a century afterwards, and might even be
condemned by the contrapuntists of to-day. The eighteenth-century
doctors who edited Byrde early in this century did not in the least
understand why he wrote as he did, and doubtless would have put him
right if they had thought of having the work sung instead of simply
having it printed as an antiquarian curiosity. The music does not
suggest the eighteenth century with its jangling harpsichords, its