remembered: Colley
Cibber, Gay, Arbuthnot, Pope, Hogarth, Fielding and Smollett.

People who through incapacity are unable to comprehend or appreciate
music, are prone to wax facetious over it--the feeble joke is the last
resort of the man who does not understand.

The noisy denizens of Grub Street, drinking perdition to that which they
can not comprehend, always getting ready to do great things, seem like
fussy pigmies beside a giant like Handel. See the fifth act ere the
curtain falls on the lives of Oliver Goldsmith, Doctor Johnson, Steele,
Addison and Dean Swift (dead at the top, the last), and the others
unhappily sent into Night; and then behold George Frederick Handel, in
his seventy-fifth year, blind, but with inward vision all aflame,
conducting the oratorio of "Elijah" before an audience of five thousand
people!

The life of Handel was packed with work and projects too vast for one
man to realize. That he deferred to the London populace and wrote down
to them at first, is true; but the greatness of the man is seen in
this--he never deceived himself. He knew just what he was doing, and in
his heart was ever a shrine to the Ideal, and upon this altar the fires
never died.

Handel was a man of affairs as well as a musician, and if he had loved
money more than Art, he could have withdrawn from the fray at thirty
years of age, passing rich.

Three times in his life he risked all in the production of Grand Opera,
and once saw a sum equal to fifty thousand dollars disappear in a week,
through the treachery of Italian artists who were pledged to help him.
At great expense and trouble he had gone abroad and searched Europe for
talent, and, regardless of outlay, had brought singers and performers
across the sea to England. In several notable instances these singers
had, in a short time, been bought up by rivals, and had turned upon
their benefactor.

But Handel was not crushed by these things. He was philosopher enough to
know that ingratitude is often the portion of the man who does well, and
a fight with a fox you have warmed into life is ever imminent. At
fifty-five, a bankrupt, he makes terms with his creditors and in a few
years pays off every shilling with interest, and celebrates the event by
the production of "Saul," the "Dead March" from which will never die.

The man had been gaining ground, making head, and at the same time
educating the taste of the English people. But still they lagged behind,
and