The Praise of Music (1586).

This work is probably not by John Case, although constantly attributed to him. The facts of the matter may be stated as follows.

The book is strictly anonymous: all that can be gathered directly from it is that the author was himself an enthusiastic musician, though not necessarily of eminence; that he was a well-read scholar, as well in the Fathers as in the Classics, and that his style and method point to a man of imaginative mind, young in years, and with considerable elegance of thought and expression. The printer writes a dedication to Sir Walter Raleigh, alluding to the book as “an Orphan of one of Lady Musickes children.” This can only be meant to convey the impression that the author was dead: on the other hand the treatise can only have been composed recently from the allusions to the controversy about Church music: in fact the author was undoubtedly a Protestant in Elizabeth’s reign, who approved of elaborate music in Churches, within certain common-sense limits.

In 1588 John Case published at Oxford an “Apologia Musices” written in Latin, and maintaining nearly the same view about Church music as the book before us, to which Case makes no allusion. Case was elected scholar of St. John’s College, Oxford, in 1564; and in 1568 fellow. “But so it was,” says Wood (Ath. Ox., ed. Bliss, i. 685), “that being Popishly affected he left his fellowship and married [in 1574] and ... read logic and philosophy to young men (mostly of the R. C. religion) in a private house in St. Mary Magd. parish.”

The external evidence about the authorship in question may be put as follows. In favour of Case is the important fact that Thomas Watson the poet in a sonnet to Case does certainly seem to allude to the English as well as the Latin treatise. Most of the expressions may, and more than one must, apply to the Apologia, but the allusion to Marsyas can only refer to the “Praise,” which indeed is mentioned by name, “Mr. John Case ... his learned booke lately made in the prayes of Musick.” Again, the fact that the Apologia nowhere alludes to the former poem is itself an argument that they were not independent of each other, while supposing that Case was partly ashamed of so light and poetical a production and desired to be judged rather by a more philosophical work, such as the Latin treatise, we can understand a desire to ignore the former. To this may be added that such considerations as the above were sufficient to convince critics like Dr. Farmer, Mr. Joseph Haslewood and Dr. Bliss, as well as almost all others who have considered the point. Against such a conclusion the following points may be urged. Antony à Wood, who wrote lives of all Oxford writers up to his own time, and who was born in 1632, will not even suggest that Case was the author, but on the contrary declares that in all his searches he could never discover who wrote the book. Richard Heber seems also to have argued against Case’s connexion. With respect to Watson’s testimony it must be remembered that he had left the University some years before either book was published, and that it is quite possible that he wrote his sonnet with both books before him and with little on which to form a judgment except an obvious similarity of subject and point of view. Some catalogues are said to have credited the printer with the authorship, and Lowndes ascribes it to Barnaby Barnes!

The internal evidence is against the common authorship of the two books. The style of E.[[17]] is light, poetical and imaginative, with numerous digressions, apologized for and repeated: that of L. is more staid and so to speak scholastic; the sentences and thoughts fall into a logical form which are natural to Case. The latter passes by the mythological part of the history of Music, the former finds it in accordance with his taste. Both authors are learned: in E. the references to the Fathers are as numerous as those from any other source: in L. the references to secular authors predominate. Both draw from common sources, such as the Theatrum vitae humanae of Beyerlinck and the classical authors: but in the longest quotation common to both, one from Ornithoparchus’s Micrologus (E. pp. 39–40: L. pref.), a treatise on singing and music (afterwards, in 1609, translated into English), in which the imaginary descent of Concentus and Accentus from Sonus is given, they differ materially in one point of the account: nor are the explanations of the kinds and effects of the Greek styles of music entirely in accord. So too there are expressions peculiar to each book which could hardly have been absent from the other, had the authors been the same person (as in E. allusions to Mercury’s three parts of music; the Roman college of minstrels; three causes of music, pleasure, grief and enthusiasm: in L. to inanimate nature moved by music, Homer as a minstrel, the idea that strings from wolves’ and sheep’s guts would not harmonize together, bees not having ears, modern musicians). But lastly the personality of the authors is different. Both indeed take up the same general point of view, that music is lawful in a Church, and both entirely neglect the science of music though they profess to be ardent musicians: but in E. there is a distinct purpose to oppose the attempt to exclude all mixed and “exquisite” music from the public services: the author writes to his equals for the purpose of interesting and convincing them: in L. we see the dialectician addressing those trained in the schools and accustomed to the subtle distinctions and formalities of scholastic logic, and also the teacher of youth, indulging in moral and didactic reflexions (pp. 53–55). Once more, Case, according to Wood, was known before 1574 to have proclivities towards the Roman Catholic religion, and accordingly in L. we find no word of blame addressed to that Church, the nearest approach being a note of triumph over the defeat of the Armada on the last page. Could he then have written, as the author of E., the following expressions, all used in contempt, “in the time of popery” (p. 129), “popish church Musicke” (ibid.), “the hypocriticall Monkes and Friers sang their seuen canonicall houres” (p. 133), “rotten rythmes of popery and superstitious inuocation or praying vnto Saints doth not giue greater cause of vomit to any man than to my selfe” (p. 136)?

The author of the “Praise of Musicke” may one day be discovered, but he will probably be found to be some other than Dr. John Case.

APPENDIX D.
DOCUMENTS.

I.

(Statute to prevent the removal of valuable books from Oxford, A.D. 1373: from Munimenta Academica, ed. by F. Anstey (Rolls Series) 1868, i. 233: with æ altered to ae.)