success in London, Handel was obliged to
return to his post at Hanover, not without
promising Queen Anne to return to England
as soon as he could obtain another leave of
absence. On his way back, he again visited
his mother, and, while in Halle, stood god-
father to a sister's child. At Hanover he
remained but a very little while before he
was allowed again to visit England, where
he produced an Ode for the Queen's Birthday
in seventeen hundred and twelve. In
November of the same year his Pastor Fido
was produced at the London opera; at the
beginning of the next year another opera
by Handel, Theseus, drew so well as to
command at the first representations double
prices for pit tickets. The Peace of Utrecht
having been concluded at the end of March,
in the year seventeen hundred and thirteen,
Handel was directed to compose the Te
Deum, and the Jubilate, still known by the
name of Utrecht. Handel was famous at
that time in London, not only as a composer,
but also as a solo-player on the harpsichord,
and enjoyed his fame so much that Queen
Anne giving him a pension for life of two
hundred a year, he broke trust with the
Elector of Hanover, and stayed in England.
But, before two more years had elapsed,
Queen Anne was dead, and the Elector of
Hanover was crowned at Westminster as
George the First. The new king not only
resented breach of trust in an old servant,
but resented also Handel's having written a
Te Deum on the Peace of Utrecht, which he
did not regard favourably. Since the musician
had good friends at Court, the new king's
pardon was, after about a year's delay,
obtained, and with it a second pension of two
hundred pounds, as well as the payment of
a third sum of two hundred a-year out of
the Privy Purse for Handel's services as
music-master to the daughter of the Prince
of Wales. So we have Handel established
firmly in England in the thirty-first year of
his age, receiving six hundred a-year from
the Court in the way of salary and pension,
and as a composer the main prop of the
Italian opera. He had not even housekeeping to
vex him; one year he passed at the house of
Mr. Andrews, a private gentleman; another
at the house built by the Earl of Burlington
in the middle of the fields, where " he was
certain that no one could come and build
beside him." The house is now among the
bees of Piccadilly. From the Earl of
Burlington's, Handel went in the train of the
king to Hanover, and was left there for a
time with one of his pupils, the son of the
Prince of Wales. He was a year at Hanover,
and, while there, wrote again upon the
subject of the Passion; the new work being an
oratorio containing fifty-five morceaux. This
M. Schoelcher brings, for the first time, to light
by the disinterment of a copy from among
the Handel MSS. in Buckingham Palace.

When he returned to England, Handel
found that the Italian theatre had failed and
was no longer open. But, the Duke of
Chandos had, at his costly palace of Cannons,
near Edgeware, a chapel to which the nobility
and gentry thronged on Sundays, as to a
sacred opera house. Of this Duke, Handel
accepted the place of chapel-master, and for
the chapel at Cannons he composed, during
the next two years, certain works known to
fame—but now no longer to be heard—the
Chandos Te Deum and the Chandos Anthems.

We should not interest the reader much,
by merely chronicling the details of a
prosperous career. At the age of thirty-five
Handel, still attached to the chapel of the
Duke of Chandos,—still supported by his
pensions and his salary from court—
plunged into the musical politics of London,
and became director of the Italian Opera,
revived under the powerful support of
noble patrons. He went abroad to collect
singers; he wrote operas; he wrote for the
Duke of Chandos, Esther, the first English
oratorio; for which the Duke paid a thousand
pounds. For the same Duke, Gay put
together the words, Handel the music, of the
well-known Acis and Galatea. Of the palace
of Cannons, which had cost the Duke of
Chandos a quarter of a million, and was sold
for eleven thousand pounds three years after
his death, there remains now not a vestige;
but, the detached chapel of which Handel was
the master has become the parish-church of
Edgeware village. It is an ill-conditioned
church; behind the altar is the organ on
which Handel played as leader and composer
of the first of English oratorios.

Handel wrote, at this period of his life,
many operas; and some of them must surely
have been very good. Airs out of them have
been transferred to sacred use. A lover's
languishing inquiry, Where art thou, my
beloved, has been turned by pious hands
into a Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty;
and a pastoral air, Green Meadows, has
become Turn Thee, O Lord; I borrow Cupid's
wings, from Handel's Rodalinda, was reset
to the words of Great Jehovah, all adoring.
In Handel's lifetime many liberties were
taken in this way, but generally in an opposite
direction. A gavot in the overture to
his Otho, had words found for it, and was
published as a Bacchanal—Bacchus, God of
Mortal Pleasures—by Mr. Handel. An air
from Rodalinda was reissued as a favourite
air of Mr. Handel's, O my pretty Punchinello!

Against the operatic kings and queens who
sang Italian under the directorship of Mr.
Handel, was set up the Beggars' Opera,
which was said, by its success, to have made
Gay rich and Rich gay. The Italian opera
scheme at last failed under its noble management;
but, Handel, who had saved ten thousand
pounds, re-opened the house in partnership
with its proprietor, after it had been