herself as a substitute for his career, only to be
declined with thanks and possibly with a formal statement that
"rejection implied no lack of merit." Seeing that these things happened
in the eighteenth century, I need not add that both women were romantic
enough to go into a decline, and die beautifully.

Whatever food music may have been to Haendel's greatness, there was
another food that rivalled it in his esteem; and that food was the
symphonic poetry of the cook. For Haendel was almost equally famous both
as a composer and a digester. In this he was rivalled by the father of
French opera, Lully, who was a gourmand, in spite of the fact that he
spent his early life as a kitchen boy. He led his wife a miserable
existence on account of his hot temper, his brutality, and his excesses
in solid and liquid food. After him came Rameau, who, like Stradivari,
fell in love with a widow while he was still in his teens and she well
out of hers. He did not wed, however, until he was forty-three, and
then he wed an eighteen-year-old girl, who was, they say, a very good
woman, and who did her best to make her husband very happy. But he was
taciturn, and rarely spoke even to his own family, and spent on them
almost less money than words. Another opera composer of the time was
Reinhard Keiser. He married a woman who, with her wealth and her voice,
rescued his operatic ventures from bankruptcy. These make a rather
sordid and unromantic group.

But again there stalks forth, to confound all our theories, the superb
figure of Gluck, who fell in love but once, and then for all time, with
Maria Anna Pergin, who loved him, and whose mother approved of him, but
whose purse-proud father despised him for a musician. The lovers
accepted the rebuff as a temporary sorrow only, and Providence, like a
playright, removed the stern parent in the next act. Gluck flew back
from Italy to Vienna to his betrothed, "with whom to his death he dwelt
in happiest wedlock." She went with him on his triumphal tours, and
spent her wealth in charities. They had no children of their own, but
adopted a niece. The devoted wife used to play his accompaniment as he
sang his own music, and when he died he took especial pains that she
should be his sole and exclusive heir, even leaving it to her pleasure
whether or not his brothers and sisters should have anything at all.

Plainly we should be thinking that music has a purifying, ennobling,
and substantial effect upo