ve derived
and furbished their brightest weapons. In the study of Bach's works the
student finds the deepest and highest reaches in the science of music;
for his mind seems to have grasped all its resources, and to have
embodied them with austere purity and precision of form. As Spenser
is called the poet for poets, and Laplace the mathematician for
mathematicians, so Bach is the musician for musicians. While Handel may
be considered a purely independent and parallel growth, it is not too
much to assert that without Sebastian Bach and his matchless studies
for the piano, organ, and orchestra, we could not have had the varied
musical development in sonata and symphony from such masters as
Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Three of Sebastian Bach's sons became
distinguished musicians, and to Emanuel we owe the artistic development
of the sonata, which in its turn became the foundation of the symphony.

HANDEL.

I.

To the modern Englishman Handel is almost a contemporary. Paintings and
busts of this great minstrel are scattered everywhere throughout the
land. He lies in Westminster Abbey among the great poets, warriors, and
statesmen, a giant memory in his noble art. A few hours after death
the sculptor Roubiliac took a cast of his face, which he wrought into
imperishable marble; "moulded in colossal calm," he towers above his
tomb, and accepts the homage of the world benignly like a god. Exeter
Hall and the Foundling Hospital in London are also adorned with marble
statues of him.

There are more than fifty known pictures of Handel, some of them by
distinguished artists. In the best of these pictures Handel is seated in
the gay costume of the period, with sword, shot-silk breeches, and coat
embroidered with gold. The face is noble in its repose. Benevolence
is seated about the finely-shaped mouth, and the face wears the
mellow dignity of years, without weakness or austerity. There are few
collectors of prints in England and America who have not a woodcut or
a lithograph of him. His face and his music are alike familiar to the
English-speaking world.

Handel came to England in the year 1710, at the age of twenty-five. Four
years before he had met, at Naples, Scarlatti, Porpora, and Corelli.
That year had been the turning-point in his life. With one stride he
reached the front rank, and felt that no musician alive could teach him
anything.

George Frederick Handel (or Handel, as the name is written in German)
w