hese questions. The first sonatas in three parts are more important.
They were published in 1683, with a portrait of the composer at the age
of twenty-four. Some pieces for strings in from three to eight parts may
be attributed to 1680. Some of the many harpsichord things may also
belong to this period.

We cannot follow Purcell's development step by step, year by year, as we
can, for instance, Beethoven's. When we come to survey his work as a
whole, we shall be able to compare the three-part sonatas issued in 1683
with the sonatas in four parts published in the year after his death. We
shall learn that towards the end of his life he was a more magnificent
master, than he was when twenty-four years old. That is the most we can
see. We may observe ode after ode, it is true, but with regard to them
we ought to be able to take into account conditions and limitations of
which nothing is recorded nor can be known. This holds, also, with
regard to the theatre music. We can merely guess at what his employers
asked him to provide. We can never know the means they placed at his
disposal. One significant thing must be noted here: the music
itself--its style, spirit, even mannerism--affords us no trustworthy
clue as to when any particular piece may have been written. For ages the
biographical copyists have not ceased to marvel at a boy of fourteen
writing the _Macbeth_ music. It is silly rubbish, with which I believe
Purcell had nothing whatever to do. They marvelled at the immature
power latent in the music to _The Libertine_, which they supposed he
wrote in 1676. Alas! the date is 1692. They marvelled still more over
_Dido and Aeneas_, attributed to 1680. Alas! again its date is much
later--1688 to 1690. The evidence of style counts for little. The truth
is that in Purcell's music there are no marked stages of development, no
great changes in style. Undoubtedly he gradually grew in power, richness
of invention, fecundity of resource; but the change was one of degree,
not of kind. He never, as Beethoven did, went out to "take a new road."
He struck what he knew to be _his_ right road at the very beginning, and
he never left it. His nature and the point in history at which he
appeared forbade that the content of his music should burst the form.
The forms he began with served him to the end.

I shall first deal with such of Purcell's compositions as may fairly be
considered as having been written before 1690. The music for the dram