John Playford, one of whose minor works, albeit that now best-known, is the subject of this paper, stands in the midst of a landscape that is musically almost barren, and one that is, by chance circumstance, almost a terra incognita. By comparison with the ‘golden’ Elizabethan age a great part of the 17th century, lustrous in literature, science and architecture, has almost nothing to offer to the musicologist; the great body of work on English printing and publishing accomplished by the Bibliographical Society still awaits continuation after 1640; an intimate knowledge of music does not necessarily invest bibliography, nor can the musicologist necessarily identify at sight the press at which a page of music was printed, nor the provenance of its type or ornaments; lastly, the material with which John Playford sought to revive the English appetite for music, the contents of the lesson-books, by which he hoped to re-instil musical knowledge, is so slight, so small in compass, or possessed of so little except melody, that to the musician of to-day it is scarcely ‘music’ at all.

Charles Villiers Stanford belongs to history.

He died on 29 March, 1924, a voluntary exile from his native country. For Dublin, city of bis birth, had what proved almost its last sight of him in 1870. It was the year in which he exchanged the Liffey for the Cam. Thereafter he crossed and re-crossed the Narrow Seas, searching the continent for stimuli his native city, for all its fantastically brilliant wit and fascinating society, could not provide.

Most musicians are aware that the Victorian attitude to Handel included an element of travesty. They are less aware, with comparatively few exceptions, of the sizeable beam in the eye of to-day. The oratorios, which contain Handel's finest work, have suffered most of all, owing to the peculiar convolutions of the British evangelical conscience. A nation that for half a century regarded the story of Saint-Saëns’ Samson and Delilah as too sacred for stage performance is capable of any kind of artistic imbecility; and Handel's oratorios are still suffering from this sort of approach.

Everyone who has ever done research will know how easy it is to go on from year to year, without ever considering the alarming possibility of being called to account. As the Chairman has said, this paper has been bespoken while the work is still in progress, so it must therefore take the form of an interim report. The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book may be regarded as the most important collection of English keyboard music.

Let me begin by confessing that the first date in the title of this paper is unintentionally but unavoidably misleading. For when, on June 7, 1753, the British Museum was incorporated by an Act authorizing the purchase of Sir Hans Sloane's collections of books, manuscripts, prints, medals and other curiosities, the library material contained little or no music. The latter part of the 18th century did indeed see the uncertain beginnings of the copyright deposit of music, and several purchases for the general library included a small quantity of antiquarian works, but the Music Room did not coalesce into something like its present shape until well into the reign of Victoria.

When this title was rashly proposed to your Secretary last year I was rather vague as to how much of the material might be new, and therefore worth producing before this Association. On the whole I have been rather disappointed on this point, for it is always more pleasant to be able to communicate facts to people which they might be unlikely to find elsewhere. Fifty years ago, for the coronation of Edward VII, a similar paper was read to the Association; but the author seems to have been unsuccessful in finding very much directly concerned with the music of the rite, and contented himself with rather speaking round his subject.