narrow, dirty streets, its artificiality, its brilliant candle-lighted
rooms where the wits and great ladies assembled and talked more or
less naughtily. There is indeed a strange, pathetic charm in the
eighteenth century to which no one can be indifferent: it is a dead
century, with the dust upon it, and yet a faint lingering aroma as of
dead rose petals. But the old-world atmosphere of Byrde's music is, at
least to me, something finer than that: it is the atmosphere of a
world which still lives: it is remote from us and yet very near: for
the odour of dead rose petals and dust you have a calm cool air, and a
sense of fragrant climbing flowers and of the shade of full foliaged
trees. All is sane, clean, fresh: one feels that the sun must always
have shone in those days. This quality, however, it shares with a
great deal of the music of the "spacious days" of Elizabeth. But of
its expressiveness there is not too much to be found in the music of
other musicians than Byrde in Byrde's day. He towered high above all
the composers who had been before him; he stands higher than any
other English musician who has lived since, with the exception of
Purcell. It is foolish to think of comparing his genius with the
genius of Palestrina; but the two men will also be reckoned close
together by those who know this Mass and the Cantiones Sacræ. They
were both consummate masters of the technique of their art; they both
had a fund of deep and original emotion; they both knew how to express
it through their music. I have not space to mention all the examples I
could wish. But every reader of this article may be strongly
recommended at once to play, even on the piano, the sublime passage
beginning at the words "Qui propter nos homines," noting more
especially the magnificent effect of the swelling mass of sound
dissolving in a cadence at the "Crucifixus." Another passage, equal to
any ever written, begins at "Et unam Sanctam Catholicam." There is a
curious energy in the repetition of "Et Apostolicam Ecclesiam," and