after Handel's death, by Frederick the Great. He kept them until 1772, when
he presented them to George III in return for a pension of L200 a year. But
he did not hand over the whole of the manuscripts to the King, and a
large collection of rough sketches and fragments was acquired by Lord
Fitzwilliam, who bequeathed them to the University of Cambridge.

The foregoing pages will have shown how singularly few are the definite
facts about Handel's life which can be ascertained with any degree of
certainty. There are a number of portraits which give some idea of his
outward appearance, but most of them represent him as a man of middle age,
and the anecdotes of his life and habits recorded by various contemporaries
belong mostly to the same period. It is almost impossible to form any idea
of his private character and his inward personality. Biographers of
musicians often attempt to deduce their characters from their musical
works, but it need hardly be said that such a procedure is thoroughly
unreliable.

Portraits are notoriously unsafe as guides to the interpretation of
character, but if the miniature reproduced by Mr. Flower as having been
painted in Rome is an authentic likeness of Handel as a young man and it
certainly bears some resemblance to the portrait by Denner painted about
1736 or 1737--he must have been singularly attractive in those days. It
cannot have been his musical abilities alone that won him the immediate
friendship of Telemann at Halle and Mattheson at Hamburg; and, although he
seems from his earliest days to have been ambitious and determined to make
a career for himself, his contemporaries give the impression that he was
retiring rather than self-assertive. In later life he was often described
as bearish and rough-mannered, but this cannot have been the case in his
youth, or he would never have achieved the position which he held in the
most cultured and distinguished society of Rome and Naples. His visit to