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as juvenile composers . They must have made a gloriout quartett , these gifted and aspiring youths . No wonder that * Parcel ! be * came an early proficient in the science of musical composition , and was even able to write correct harmony and counterpoint at an age , when to be qualified for the performance of choral service is , in general , all that can be expected . ' There was the further stimulus of successful ambition . At the age of eighteen ( 1676 )
he was appointed organist of Westminster abbey , < probably the only instance known of so young a man being appointed to an organist ' s situation of 6 uch high honour and importance / Six years afterwards , he became one of the organists of the Chapel Koyal . The biographer discredits the tradition of Purceirs love for Italian music having originated in his intercourse with the band brought over by Mary D'Este , of Modena , the wife of James
II . ; and he probably had , at an earlier period , devoted himself to the study of Garissimi and Stradella . Whatever led him to that study , it was an additional circumstance to the favourable combination of influences under which his genius was developed . Seldom is it that the links of a golden chain can be so distinctly traced at so great a distance . Seldom is it that there is so happy a concurrence of external agencies operating harmoniously upon a nature so admirably prepared for them . In and about him , all things were fitly framed together . He was amongst the few people in the world who are * placed according to their capacity /
and richly has the world reaped the advantage . We are often disposed , in our simplicity , to wonder that the consequences of these rare coincidences do not dispose society to aim systematically at their production . What has made that well-known verse in Gray ' s Elegy , < Full many a gem , ' &c . —what has made that beautiful common-place , as common-place as it is beautiful ? What , but universal conviction of the truth which it conveys ; a
conviction made universal by personal observation . And yet how little is done in obedience to the practical lesson which is contained in that conviction 1 Generation after generation leaves the living pearl to shine only in its darkling cave , and the living flower to breathe its unscented fragrance in the wilderness . It is
but a chance that the right person gets into the right position . Society is slow to learn the first lesson of Joseph Lancaster ; and that inscription which has so often gladdened our eyes as a precious fragment of wisdom , those long black letters on a large white ground , announcing ' a place for everything , and everything in its place / should be fixed , aloft yet legible , in our palaces and workshops , in churches and theatres , in exchanges and courts of law . What events did for Purcell it were well that social wisdom
should do , as far as possible , for all . An impartial and comprehensive plan of national education might be devised and established , in the earlier stages of which peculiarities of talent and character might be developed and observed ; and in its later
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Henry Purcell . 391
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1833, page 291, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2614/page/3/
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