ill-judging audience." Queen Mary seems to have had a liking for very popular music, and once seriously offended Purcell, when some of his compositions were being performed to her, by asking to have sung instead the old Scotch ballad, "Cold and raw." So when he next had to compose a birthday ode for her, he carefully introduced the air of "Cold and raw." When the Queen died he wrote two beautiful anthems for the funeral service in the Abbey, "Blessed is the man," and "Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts," of which a singer in the choir writes, "I appeal to all who were present, to those who understood music as well as to those who did not, whether they ever heard anything so rapturously fine and solemn, so heavenly in the operation, drawing tears from all, and yet a plain natural composition, which shows the power of music when ’tis rightly fitted and adapted to devotional purposes." At many a great public funeral since, this touching music of Purcell’s has been used, and nothing has taken its place. Delicate from his boyhood, it was early evident that Henry Purcell’s life as organist of the Abbey was to be a short one, and in the year 1695 a pathetic little note was added to his song, "Lovely Albinia," stating that, "This is the last song the author sett before his sickness." His illness was just a wasting away, "dangerously ill in the constitution, but in good and perfect minde and memory, thanks be to God," to quote his own words. A touching account has been given, in Dr. Cumming’s "Life of Purcell" of the closing scene in this bright young life:— "He lay in a house on the west side of Dean’s Yard, Westminster, from whence he could probably hear some faint murmurs of the Evensong service wafted from the old Abbey close by, some well-remembered phrase, perhaps, of one of his own soul-stirring anthems. The Psalms for the day (the 21st) to be chanted at that evening service, concluded with words he had set to music which the world was not likely soon to forget, music which still remains unsurpassed in truthfulness and dignity. A more noble or more fitting death-chant for a child of son" it would be difficult to find— "’Blessed be the Lord God of Israel From everlasting, and world without end. And let all the people say, Amen.’ "So his gentle spirit passed into the better world, there to continue his service of song and praise in fulness and perfection." His own anthems were sung at his funeral; the organ he had so loved pealed out its rich farewell to him; and on his gravestone are these words in Latin— "Dead? No, he lives, while yonder organ’s sound, And sacred echoes to the choir rebound."