cry against the airs and impertinences of the opera-singers; in another, he rejoices (as in the case of Mistress Anastasia Robinson-Lady Peterborough-when, on her being offended by Senesino, Lord Peterborough caned the impudent coxcomb) "that the time is past when singers allowed themselves to be caned by lords." There is, in short, no order or consistency in this book. Its orthography, moreover, is impure, as regards foreign words and names, to a degree which is strange in any well-educated foreigner. Yet in spite of these defects we have read it with considerable pleasure. M. Schoelcher's love of his subject is sincere and unaffected, and he has collected a large quantity of materials which, if not absolutely new, were not easily to be met with.

The life of Handel, however, was worthy the best hand of the best writer of biographies. The period of English history which it embraces is full of interest and rich in anecdote. If the Elizabethan era gave us our poems, the first fifty years of the eighteenth century yielded us our memoirs. It was a time of wit, a time of imperfect settlement, a time of political intrigue, a time of conspiracy. The Kilmansegges and Schulembergs who came over" for our goods" from Hanover, in the train of the new German sovereign, trembled over their chocolate-cups, or their tankards, at the thought of a Stuart hidden in disguise at Kensington, or holding his illicit levees in Grosvenor Square. The new opera-manager, or the foreigner who arrived to sing, stood a chance of being mobbed as a secret emissary, besides being cordially hated as an interloper who arrived to fatten on the food which England should have distributed among its children. The French dancing-master was possibly one French spy; the French hair-dresser might be another. The Court was torn with family dissensions, in which the name and the fame of the music-master of the Princess Royal were mixed up. The Queen was compelled to swallow gross epithets from the over-familiar minister who taught her how to manage the King. The King sat under the sarcasms of a neighbor no less redoubtable than Duchess Sarah of Marl borough, who dared to sneer at the temporary gallery built at St. James', on the occasion of a royal marriage-as at neighbor George's orange chest." It

was in one respect an age poor in imagination, but rich in those marked characters and vehement contrasts which are so precious to a biographer-an age, moreover, which did not lack its chroniclers, its diarists, its correspondents-the age during which Pope was writing his letters, and Hervey keeping his memoirs, and Hogarth painting his satires, and Lady Mary Wortley breaking out into the. eccentricities of foreign_adventure, for subsequent Walpoles to lampoon-when Dryden, as a tragic author, had not been altogether superseded by Addison and Aaron Hill-when the comedies of Congreve still prolonged upon the stage the wit and the license of the Restorationwhen an English duke kept up the state of a chapel and an orchestra with a resi dent capell meister, as the Esterhazys and Palffys of Austria, or the small princes of Italy, have done-an age, in short, prepared for the uses of any painter of life, manners, and character who desired to find a sumptuous framework and a rich background for a great artist-his principal figure.

As regards music, too, the epoch in which Handel appeared, his training, his choice of residence, and that august fame of his which "bestrid the world," offer a wide field for any one capable of dealing with them. In the absence of mighty painters, or architects, or romancers, or dramatists, posterity may point to him as the greatest poet of the first half of the seventeenth century. The shade of Swift might rise to protest against such honor being awarded to one who was a fiddler," fit companion to "a drab”—so ran the Dean of St. Patrick's choicely coarse phraseology. Yet the title would not be unjustly bestowed. What Michael Angelo was in painting, what Shakspeare was in drama, Handel was within the limits of his own art; as gigantic in conception, as daring in execution, as the great Florentine-as carelessly fertile, as boundlessly rich, as unconsciously simple, as our universal dramatist. Handel was born, too, into a world of art ripe for discovery. Music was never more scientific than at the commencement of the last century; but by that time it had been lately proved that music meant something more than science alone. The seductions of rhythmical melody - the charms of beautiful tone and delicate expression which lie in the human voice, had broken through the

walls of ancient custom and pedantry. It was still demanded of the musician that he should be severely ingenious and strictly accurate in counterpoint-the orthography and syntax of expression; but grace, grandeur, variety, fascination in his ideas, and in their garniture, had begun also to take their place in the vocabulary of his art. Palestrina had shown the world how - much sonorous beauty was to be produced out of a string of mere chords. Corelli and Scarlatti-the one with his stately band of violins, the other with his more fiery and freakish hapsichord-had begun to methodize known dancing measures, and to apply them to the more august forms of instrumental composition. Marcello had already found among the singers of Venice such graceful and not ignoble melodies, to accompany the Psalms of David, as remind us of the saints of Giorgione and Palma, and the patrician ladies of Bonifazio. The high finish as an instrument to which the organ had been brought, had called out in Germany that executive ingenuity which in its turn engenders and quickens thought. The school of great players numbered Zackau, Kuhnau, and that greatest of living or dead masters of the organ, Sebastian Bach. Opera was no longer that sort of cumbrous masque, absurdly amateur, childishly theatrical, or irreverently ecclesiastical in its pomps, which it had been in its earliest years. The great singers then in being, though spoilt as a class by ignorance and affectation, and a vulgar vanity, which reduced their notions of art to a mere fancy for personal display, already included some who had brains as well as throats, and who cherished that desire to help art forward by the production of new effects, which fired the ambition of the composer. There was already some at tempt at dramatic interest on the musical stage, which, crippled and timid as it now seems, bespoke progress and increase, and invited experiment. The world of music, in short, was all before a genius where to choose; and the man who appeared to conquer it, to leave a notable name on the pages of the book of poetry, and a trace in his own art of unequaled breadth and grandeur, seems by nature and circumstances to have been alike endowed with a temperament which gave the fullest scope to every gift, and with opportunities which with diligence, address, and daring insured him immortality.

George Frederic Handel was born at Halle in Saxony, in the year 1685-the son of a substantial surgeon, sixty-three years of age at his birth. The idea of the child becoming a musician seems to have been as insupportable to Dr. Handel as if he had been the father of a prodigy living in some English country-town. The boy was to be made into a respectable lawyer; and the usual means (as old as Time and as cruel as Ignorance) were taken to prevent his finding any acccess to the only teaching he chose to receive. Persecution, however, was not thrown away: the the boy was persevering as well as imaginative. Old Dr. Handel's training may have strengthened in him that resolution to work out hs career which distinguished his life that arrogance which, by overruling accident and despising difficulty, led him to take his highest flights when his fortunes were the lowest. Out of England, "The Messiah," and "Judas," and "Israel," and "Samson," could hardly have been written. In England, they would hardly have been written, had Handel not been the bankrupt opera-manager, whose credit was gone, and whose silly foes were determined to crush him. The child who would get at the keys of the spinet somehow-who would not be left behind when Dr. Handel chose to go to visit his brother-in-law, the Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels' valet, and who enlisted in his behalf the interference of the valet's ducal master, was the father of the man whose revenge on the town for its caprices and fashionable neglect, was the production of those sublime oratorios to which the Christian and the civilized world will never be tired of listening.

Not many years, however-and it may be hoped no vital amount of happinesswere lost by little Handel in the hardening process. The old surgeon, overborne by the Duke, put the boy regularly to school with organist Zackau-during his son's course of three years' study, steadily throwing in such a dose of Latin as he conceived might in time neutralize the studies of finger and of fugue, and rescue the youth from the discredit of becoming an artist. The Latin was swallowed, but the love of law never came therewith; and when the boy was eleven years of age

by that time a prodigious player on keyed instruments-he fell under the influence which has never failed to fascinate any one born with the sense of beauty so

strong within him as Handel-the spell of Italy. The Dominican father, Attilio Ariosti, (affectedly named by M. Schoelcher as Attilio,) happened to be at Berlin, as the chapel-master of the Elector of Brandenburg, during the visit of the boy to the Prussian capital. Ariosti was by no means eminent as a musician, but he is described as a man of sweet and affable temper, who discovered the genius of the young Saxon-made him play by hours together, and, it is fair to imagine, cherished that love of suavity, grace, and roundness of period, which from its earliest period distinguished the Italian school of music; and which Handel never lost sight of in his works, however grand might be the theme, however rude the character, however awful the situation. There is no German composer, of any epoch, (Mozart, perhaps, excepted,) who was so little German as he.* He is to be ranged with the Claris, Corellis, Colonnas, Scarlattis of Rome and Florence, and not with the Buxtehudes and Bachs of his own country. Sense must needs be satisfied with him, as well as spiritual contemplation, or scientific research; and sense could not be satisfied until Italy had become a reality, not a dream; a place of experience, not of anticipation. Even in these days, there is no training that will altogether replace the training of the South: Italy's "fatal gift of beauty" is undying. In the time of Handel, that beauty still wore all her purple and gold, her jewels and her fine linen. The musicians were still not so much the buffoons, as the companions of nobles. Some of them were churchmen, eligible for more intellectual occupations than the wielding of a baton, or the resolving of a discord: one, Marcello, was a patrician of Venice; another, Corelli, was the household guest of a Roman Cardinal. All, it is fair to assume, in position, in culture, in manners, were more refined than the homely German organist, half schoolmaster, half theorist. All were surrounded with memories, and traditions, and evidences of such universal artists as Michael Angelo, and Leonardo da Vinci, and Salvator Rosa,

*To avoid digression, let it be here pointed out, that in that exercise of his art, which was in his day most specially German, namely, composition for the organ, Handel was comparatively so slight, so popular, and so pleasing, that his writings for the instrument are set comparatively small store by, owing to their want of depth and contrapuntal severity.

which let them fall on an ear ever so dull, on a nature ever so gross, do not wholly fall in vain, nor without leaving some print or film, however slight, which has its beauty, its grace, its refinement. By no analyst or biographer with whom we are acquainted, have Handel's sympathies with, or obligations to, the South, been generously or gratefully admitted. He himself, more just, more conscientious, recorded them in his masterpiece, where with his own handwriting he owned to the origin of the "Pastoral Symphony," as derived from the droning pipes of the rustic players who come into Rome before Christmas-time to play before the images of the Blessed Virgin.

M. Schoelcher's narrative of Handel's early days, though less completely wrought out than it might have been, had he ransacked the old libraries and music shops of Saxony, Prussia, and Hanover, may be followed with interest. It is well known that the young Saxon was for a time closely connected with the Hamburgh theater, on the stage of which he made his "maiden speech" in opera; that while there he was comrade, colleague, and friend with Mattheson, which, as has happened in the comradeship of other young men, did not preclude a fierce quarrel and a duel betwixt them. It has been told before, how Prince Gaston de' Medici, brother to the Duke of Tuscany, who chanced to be in the Hanse Town about that time, chanced also, with the true Medici spirit of divination, to discern the merit of the young composer and orchestral player, whom he invited to bear him company to Italy. Adam Hiller (true to the spirit of antagonism) relates in his "Lebenschreibungen," that the young German, on being shown by the Prince a large collection of Italian music, remarked that "he did not find in them any thing very superior." But the reported saying and its sequel are at variance. After a few years of rough residence at Hamburg, not, however, of time wholly lost by Handel-in place of his taking the organ at Lubeck, and marrying the organist's daughter there, (a condition of the appointment akin to the old succession of headsman to headsman,) in place of settling down to such a life of cheerful citizenship, temperate contemplation, and indefatigable industry, as that led by Sebastian Bach, at Leipsic, the young operacomposer yielded to the fascination,