ift
of opinion, all the great singers, who had supported him at the outset,
joined the rival ranks or left England. In fact it may be almost said
that the English public were becoming dissatisfied with the whole system
and method of Italian music. Colley Cibber, the actor and dramatist,
explains why Italian opera could never satisfy the requirement of
Handel, or be anything more than an artificial luxury in England: "The
truth is, this kind of entertainment is entirely sensational." Still
both Handel and his friends and his foes, all the exponents of musical
opinion in England, persevered obstinately in warming this foreign
exotic into a new lease of life.

The quarrel between the great Saxon composer and his opponents
raged incessantly both in public and private. The newspaper and the
drawing-room rang alike with venomous diatribes. Handel was called a
swindler, a drunkard, and a blasphemer, to whom Scripture even was
not sacred. The idea of setting Holy Writ to music scandalized the
Pharisees, who reveled in the licentious operas and love-songs of
the Italian school. All the small wits of the time showered on Handel
epigram and satire unceasingly. The greatest of all the wits, however,
Alexander Pope, was his firm friend and admirer; and in the "Dunciad,"
wherein the wittiest of poets impaled so many of the small fry of the
age with his pungent and vindictive shaft, he also slew some of the most
malevolent of Handel's foes.

Fielding, in "Tom Jones," has an amusing hit at the taste of the period:
"It was Mr. Western's custom every afternoon, as soon as he was drunk,
to hear his daughter play on the harpsichord; for he was a great lover
of music, and perhaps, had he lived in town, might have passed as a
connoisseur, for he always excepted against the finest compositions of
Mr. Handel."

So much had it become the fashion to criticise Handel's new effects in
vocal and instrumental composition, that some years later Mr. Sheridan
makes one of his characters fire a pistol simply to shock the audience,
and makes him say in a stage whisper to the gallery, "This hint,
gentlemen, I took from Handel."

The composer's Oxford experience was rather amusing and suggestive.
We find it recorded that in July, 1733, "one Handell, a foreigner, was
desired to come to Oxford to perform in music." Again the same writer
says: "Handell with his lousy crew, a great number of foreign fiddlers,
had a performance for his own benefit at the t