Mattheson performed the leading part. All
were successful, but Almira, the maiden
opera, succeeded best. Handel wrote also,
while at Hamburg, chests full of cantatas,
sonatas, and so forth, including a cantata on
"the Passion." A very few cantatas, Almira
and the Passion are still extant in
manuscript. Everything else written by Handel
in his youth is lost.

Prince Gaston de' Medici, brother of the
Grand Duke of Tuscany, being in Hamburg
for a time, offered to take Handel to Florence;
but, he had no taste to be, like his half-
brother, a servant in a prince's train. From
money earned at the theatre, and by giving
lessons in music, he put by, after sending due
help to his mother, two hundred ducats for
the education of himself in Italy, and went
to Florence, his own master, after three
years' residence in Hamburg. He arrived
in Florence when his age was twenty-one
years and six months, and he remained six
months in that city, producing there an opera
called Roderigo, for which the Grand Duke
gave him a service of plate and a purse
containing a hundred sequins. Prince Gaston's
hospitality also was welcome to him, though
he had declined his service.

From Florence Handel went to Venice,
where he arrived at the beginning of the
carnival, and wrote in three weeks his opera
of Agrippina, which was received by the
Venetians with enthusiastic cries of " Long
live the dear Saxon!" After a stay of about
three months in Venice the dear Saxon went
to Rome, where he remained a year, and
wrote an opera called Silla, which never was
produced; but of which Monsieur Schoelcher
(whose recent and well-studied biography of
Handel is our guide in the writing of this
sketch) has found among the Handel MSS.
at Buckingham Palace a complete copy. He
wrote at Rome some pieces of religious
music, and towards the end of his stay there—
at the age of twenty-three—an oratorio upon
the Resurrection. That oratorio was written
in the house of the Marquis de Ruspoli.
Cardinal Pamphili was another of his
entertainers, and that cardinal wrote a poem on
the Triumph of Time, which Handel made
into an oratorio, for performance at the house
of the Cardinal Ottoboni, who " had the soul
of an emperor, nor was there any princely
notion but what he endeavoured to imitate,
entertaining the people with comedies, operas,
puppet-shows, oratorios," &c. So says his
obituary notice in the pages of Sylvanus
Urban.

From Rome, Handel went to Naples, and
there wrote his Acis, Galatea, and Polyphemus,
being the first and unedited form of the
Acis and Galatea, produced twenty-four years
afterwards in England. Handel while in
Italy, although a Lutheran, composed many
pieces for the cathedrals and churches of the
Roman Catholics, and among others a grand
Magnificat, with a double chorus, from which,
thirty years afterwards, he transferred five
choruses and two duets into his Israel in
Egypt. He made much use in this way of
his early writings.

Revisiting Rome, Venice, and Florence on
his homeward route, Handel returned to
Germany, uncertain in what town to settle.
He went first to Hanover, a town then
altogether new to him, where the Elector
George of Brunswick, afterwards our George
the First, offered him the place of chapel-
master at a salary of about three hundred
pounds a year: Handel then being not quite
twenty-five years old. But he had met at
the Elector's court some English noblemen,
who tempted him with prospects of the fame
and wealth to be acquired in England, and
he therefore was allowed to accept the offered
terms upon his own condition, that he should
be free to go to England when he pleased.
He went accordingly to England ten months
afterwards, and arrived for the first time in
London (being then nearly twenty-six years
old) at the close of the year seventeen hundred
and ten. On the way he visited his mother
and his music-master Zackau.

At that time Italian opera was taking root
in London. The first opera performed wholly
in Italian by Italian artists had been produced
a few months before Handel reached
London. It was Almahide, by an unknown
composer, and was performed—in deference to
patriotic people, as the Daily Post announced
—" with English singing between the acts by
Doggett, Mrs. Lindsay, and Mrs. Cross." It
had been followed by a second opera, wholly
Italian, the Hydaspes of Mancini. Handel
immediately after his arrival was engaged to
write the music of a third. Aaron Hill, then
the director of the Haymarket Theatre, both
asked for the music and composed for it a
libretto on the episode of Rinaldo and
Armida in the Jerusalem Delivered. It was
translated into Italian from Hill's English by
Giacomo Rossi, who could not translate
faster than " the Signor Hendel, the Orpheus
of our age, composed." He has, said Rossi,
"scarcely given me time enough to write it,
and I have beheld, to my great astonishment,
an entire opera harmonised to the last degree
of perfection, in the short space of a fortnight,
by this sublime genius." Handel's
Rinaldo, the third Italian opera performed
in London, was the first that had a great
success. A cavatina in the first act found its
way to all the harpsichords in Britain, a
march in it was adopted by the Life Guards,
and was played every day upon parade for the
next forty years. The publisher of this opera
was said to have gained fifteen hundred
pounds by it, which caused Handel to write
to him:

My dear Sir,—As it is only right that we should be
upon an equal footing, you shall compose the next
opera, and I will sell it.

After six or seven months' enjoyment of