Johann
Sebastian Bach walked fifty miles on foot to hear, and whose
compositions he studied and profited from. Old Buxtehude, himself the
son of an organist, had himself married the daughter of the organist who
had preceded him. The daughter he left behind to frighten away aspiring
candidates did not languish long. According to Chrysander, a certain
J.C. Schieferdecker, who is famous for nothing else, wed the daughter,
and "got the pretty job" ("_erhielt den schoenen Dienst_").

The elder of the two young men was Johann Mattheson (1681--1764), a sort
of "Admirable Crichton," who married in 1709 Catherine Jennings,
daughter of an English clergyman and the relative of a British admiral.
That is all of his story that belongs here.

The younger man, whose life hung on a button, was that great personage
whose name has been spelled almost every way imaginable between Hendtler
and Handel--the later form being preferred by the English, who, as
somebody said, love to speak learnedly of "Handel and Glueck." It is not
needful here to tell the story of his brilliant life and the big events
it crowded into the four and seventy years between 1685 and 1759. His
friend Mattheson, like Beethoven, spent his later years in the dungeon
of deafness. Haendel, like his great rival Bach (who was born the same
year), spent seven years in almost total blindness, three operations
having failed. In almost every other respect the careers of these two
men were unlike, particularly in the obscure and prolific married life
of the one and in the almost royal prominence of the other's
bachelorhood.

Haendel never married, and seems never even to have been in love, though
he was an unusually pious son and a fond brother.

The only time on record when he took a woman into his arms was the
occasion when the great singer, Cuzzoni, refused to sing an air of his
the way he wished it. He seized her, and, dragging her to a window,
threatened to throw her out, thundering, "I always knew you were a
devil, but I'll show you that I am Beelzebub, the prince of devils."

Haendel's greatest love seems to have been for things to eat. In the
memoirs of him, published anonymously [by Doctor Mainwaring] in 1760,
the author says that Haendel was "always habituated to an uncommon
portion of food and nourishment," and accuses him of "excessive
indulgence in this lowest of gratifications."

"He certainly paid more attention to it than is becoming in any man; but
it is