d accompany them back to
Merry England.

He went, and being introduced as Signore Handello, he was received with
salvos of welcome. There is a time to plant, and a time to reap. There
is a time for everything--launch your boat only at full of tide. London
was ripe for Italian Opera. Discovery had recently been made in England
that Art was born in Italy. It had traveled as far as Holland, and so
Dutch artists were hard at work in English manor-houses, painting
portraits of ancestors, dead and living. Music, one branch of Art, had
made its way up to Germany, and here was an Italian who spoke English
with a German accent, or a German who spoke Italian--what boots it, he
was a great musician!

Handel's Italian opera, "Rinaldo," was given at a theater that stood on
the site of the present Haymarket. The production was an immense
success. All educated people knew Latin (or were supposed to know it),
and Signore Handello announced that his Italian was an improvement on
the Latin. And so all the scholars flocked to see the play, and those
who were not educated came too, and looked knowing. In order to hold
interest, there were English syncopated songs between the acts--ragtime
is a new word, but not a new thing.

Handel was very wise in this world's affairs. He assured England that it
was the most artistic country on the globe. He wrote melodies that
everybody could whistle. Airs from "Rinaldo" were thrummed on the
harpsichord from Land's End to John O'Groat's. The grand march was
adopted by the Life Guards, and at least one air from that far-off opera
has come down to us--the "Tascie Ch'io Pianga," which is still listened
to with emotion unfeigned. The opera being uncopyrighted, was published
entire by an enterprising Englishman from Dublin by the name of Walsh.
At two o'clock one morning at the "Turk's Head," he boasted he had
cleared over two thousand pounds on the sale of it. Handel was present
and responded, "My friend, the next time you will please write the opera
and I will sell it." Walsh took the hint, they say, and sent his check
on the morrow to the author for five hundred pounds. And the good sense
of both parties is shown in the fact that they worked together for many
years, and both reaped a yellow harvest of golden guineas.

On the birthday of Queen Anne, Handel inscribed to her an ode, which we
are told was played with a full band. The performance brought the
diplomatic Handel a pension of two hundred pounds