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)
was born at Halle, Lower Saxony, in the year 1685. Like German
literature, German music is a comparatively recent growth. What little
feeling existed for the musical art employed itself in cultivating the
alien flowers of Italian song. Even eighty years after this Mozart and
Haydn were treated like lackeys and vagabonds, just as great actors were
treated in England at the same period. Handel's father looked on music
as an occupation having very little dignity.

Determined that his young son should become a doctor like himself, and
leave the divine art to Italian fiddlers and French buffoons, he did not
allow him to go to a public school even, for fear he should learn the
gamut. But the boy Handel, passionately fond of sweet sounds, had, with