ly of almost equal fame was the group of violin makers of
Cremona, the Stradivari. The founder of the house, Antonio, began his
life romantically enough. When he was a youngster of seventeen or
eighteen, he fell in love with Francesca Capra, a widow of a man who
had been assassinated. She was nine or ten years older than Stradivari,
and they were married on July 4, 1667. In the following December the first
of their six children was born. Two of his sons took up their father's
trade. Both of them died bachelors, and the third son became a priest.

At the age of fifty-eight Francesca died. After a year of widowerhood,
he wedded again; this time, a woman fourteen or fifteen years younger
than he. She bore him five children, and he outlived her less than a
year. His descendants dwelt for generations, flourishing on his fame,
at Cremona.

The Amati were also a numerous family of luthiers, as were the
Guarnieri, but I have not been able to poke into their private affairs,
though he who called himself "Jesus," was addicted to imprisonment, and
is said to have made violins out of bits of wood brought him by the
jailer's daughter. She sold the fiddles to buy him luxuries.

But now, lest we should too firmly believe that music exerts an amorous
and domestic effect, we are confronted with the ponderous majesty of
one of the proudest spirits that ever strode the creaking earth, Georg
Friedrich Haendel, who was born the very same year as the much-married
Bach, but led a life as opposite as North Pole from South. The first
snub he dealt to Cupid, was when he was eighteen, and sought the post
of organist held by the famous old Buxtehude, who had married years
before the daughter of an organist to whose post he aspired, and had
left behind him a daughter thirty-four years old as an incumbrance upon
his successor. Haendel could have got the job, if he would have had the
girl. But she was almost twice his age, and he left her for another
musician to marry in. Then he went to Italy, and was pursued in vain
under those bewitching skies by no belated German spinster, but by a
beautiful and attractive Italienne. Her, he also spurned. When he was
in England, he seems to have come very near falling in love with two
different women. The mother of the first objected to him as a mere
fiddler. After she died, the father invited him into the family, only
to be told that the invitation was too late. The other woman, a lady of
high degree, offered