ubbles right away from him and, though I have
endeavoured for some fifty years and more to acquire the art, I never
yet could start the bubble off my tongue without its bursting. Now
things like this really do relieve the tedium of church, but no missal
that I have ever seen will do anything except increase it.

In 1848 he left Allesley and went to Shrewsbury under the Rev. B. H.
Kennedy. Many of the recollections of his school life at Shrewsbury are
reproduced for the school life of Ernest Pontifex at Roughborough in _The
Way of All Flesh_, Dr. Skinner being Dr. Kennedy.

During these years he first heard the music of Handel; it went straight
to his heart and satisfied a longing which the music of other composers
had only awakened and intensified. He became as one of the listening
brethren who stood around "when Jubal struck the chorded shell" in the
_Song for Saint Cecilia's Day_:

Less than a god, they thought, there could not dwell
Within the hollow of that shell
That spoke so sweetly and so well.

This was the second great event in his life, and henceforward Italy and
Handel were always present at the bottom of his mind as a kind of double
pedal to every thought, word, and deed. Almost the last thing he ever
asked me to do for him, within a few days of his death, was to bring
_Solomon_ that he might refresh his memory as to the harmonies of "With
thee th' unsheltered moor I'd trace." He often tried to like the music
of Bach and Beethoven, but found himself compelled to give them up--they
bored him too much. Nor was he more successful with the other great
composers; Haydn, for instance, was a sort of Horace, an agreeable,
facile man of the world, while Mozart, who must have loved Handel, for he
wrote additional accompaniments to the _Messiah_, failed to move him. It
was not that he disputed the greatness of these composers, but he was out
of sympathy with them, and never could forgive the last two for having
led music astray from the Handel tradition, and paved the road from Bach
to Beethoven. Everything connected with Handel interested him. He
remembered old Mr. Brooke, Rector of Gamston, North Notts, who had been
present at the Handel Commemoration in 1784, and his great-aunt, Miss
Susannah Apthorp, of Cambridge, had known a lady who had sat upon
Handel's knee. He often regretted that these were his only links with
"the greatest of all composers."

Besides his love for Handel he