a pfennig, decided that his last pfennig should go to beat the town, since he was fighting for a right which he had bought with the house. The Elector wobbled. He decided once more against the town, but gave it the right to appeal. The barber-surgeon fought on. Then some bold fellow marched up to Handel's house with a document summoning him to appear before the Town. Council, and the knave threw the summons through George's window. The blood of Handel was fired anew. The insult! If the rapscallion had only delivered the document into his hands and waited while he made suitable comments thereon! But he had hurled in his paper and run from the lion he had prodded. Again the barber-surgeon went to the Elector. Again the Elector was bored to tears. This silly squabble was becoming a nuisance. He wrote finally to the town of Halle and said that unless they desisted in annoying the barber-surgeon he would fine the town 500 gold florins and, if need be, put in troops.1 That ended the business. The barber-surgeon had won. Disgruntled burghers sneered at him in the streets. But the keen eye of the man never swerved or was afraid. He went on selling wine at The Yellow Stag for years, then, feeling that he could rest on his victory, he handed the licence over to the town-a victor who now performed a gracious act.2 It had been a bitter battle and a hard-earned victory! But its record is necessary because the whole affair is so typical of the barber-surgeon. Could a man with that mouth, that violent pugnacity sit down calmly while they stole a single right from him which his money had bought? He would have fought Europe single-handed for a case which had the vestige of right hidden somewhere in it. He was a strong man. A strong man of vast principles. Bigoted over principles. Narrow. Intensely disagreeable. If he won a victory he would, in common parlance, "rub it in." A man with a rather withered heart that blossomed weakly at times like some late October rose, unfragrant, a little stale with the day 1 Report of the case in the State Archives at Magdeburg. Handel's Real Birthplace to which it had been born. This Handel never warmed to the sun of human understanding. He was a creature aloof. Judging from the area on which it stood, the house which the barber-surgeon took to himself after his marriage must have been of considerable size, large enough, in fact, to house three families. It is doubtful if any of the original building still remains. The biographers of George Frideric Handel, the son of this barber-surgeon, have, for some unknown reason, followed each other in making a curious mistake about the Handel-house in Halle. They have declared that the house in which the barbersurgeon lived, and in which his son George Frideric was destined to be born, was the house adjoining. They have depicted it with photograph and sketch. As a matter of fact the house that has been gilded with a fame it never earned is even now decorated with bays, with the names of George Frideric's oratorios on its plaster front, and with a bust of George Frideric over its doorway. It has been stared at, photographed, decrepit deceiving thing. But the child who was later to decoy this world with his music never stumbled down its dark passages: that child's first cry on waking to a world of hurt and distress was never heard by its walls, its low dank ceilings. True, the boy must have played often in the courtyard that lies within its gate; the narrow cobbled street knew the patter of his feet, the roof, ageing then, and so much older now, stooped over him as if in benison, but that venerable house, with all its fabled romance, was never the Handel-house. The mistake has continued until it is almost old enough to claim to be veracious. But recently a Professor of Halle University and a great Handel student has discovered undeniable evidence that Handel was never born in the house that claims him, but in the adjoining building, a corner house built at right angles with fronts on two streets-or, rather, in the building that stood on the site. The present house, Nicolai Strasse 5, which stands on the site of the musician's birthplace, was built in 1800. 1 Dr Bernhard Weissenborn. 2 In an advertisement which appeared in the Wöchentliche Hallische Anzeiger on December 1783, the house which stands on the site of Handel's birthplace is Eleven years after the barber-surgeon had bought his palatial house in the Schlamm, disaster overtook the district. On 2nd May 1676, a house in the quarter suddenly burst into flames.1 House after house was involved as a strong wind, rushing up the narrow lanes, hurled the sparks and flaming débris in all directions. The parsimonious builders of those days had bunched the houses together in huge clusters, separated only by the narrowest alleys, and in a very short time the Schlamm was a blazing cauldron. It was night-the original fire was only discovered at ten o'clock-and most of the respectable citizens of the Schlamm were in bed. In a short time the adjoining streets, the Great Ulrichstrasse, the Dachritz, the Barfüsser (Bare-foot monks' street) made a palisade of fire about the Handel mansion, and before very long thirty-eight houses lay in heaps of charred and smoking wood. Those houses which escaped actual destruction had their backs burned away; eleven barns followed the houses to the ashheap, and women and children were killed and injured, or disappeared in the flames. How far the Handel mansion-and it undoubtedly was a mansion for the period-suffered in the conflagration there is no record, but the barber-surgeon saved himself and his family. Thereafter, the disaster was closely followed by others, which brought increasing anxiety into the lives of the Handels. Four years later Prince Augustus of Saxony died, described as the former house of Handel, afterwards of Flörke, who was the husband of George Frideric Handel's niece. This house then bore the number 976; the old number was 528, afterwards 528A. The next following building, 975 (old number 529), which was rebuilt about 1720, was put up for sale in 1801 in the Hallisches Patriotisches Wochenblatt, and described in detail. The large courtyard, extensive garden, side wings and “ a front of twelve windows" can only be applied to the building which to-day (1923) appears decorated as the Handel-house." Through my discovery of these two advertisements it is proved that the house in which Handel was born therefore stood on the spot where the corner house stands to-day-Nicolai Strasse 5.-Dr Weissenborn. Further evidence that the house at the corner of Nicolai Street and Kleine Ulrichst is the house in which Handel was born is to be found in this letter which was published in the Wiener Theaterzeitung, 22nd October 1806, over the signature of a man named Pokels. "The widow of the late Ratmeister, Mrs Reichhelm has told me that her great-uncle, the famous Handel, was born in the corner house of the Kleine Ulrichstrasse,' and that her late husband had for that reason caused the house to be rebuilt to dedicate it to the lasting memory of this famous man, and that he had intended to erect therein a special monument in honour of Handel, if sudden death had not overtaken him." This Mrs Reichhelm was a granddaughter of Mrs Michaelsen, Handel's elder sister. 1 Dreyhaupt, "Chronik des Saal Kreises," vol. ii. Family Affairs and the town of Halle passed from Saxony to Brandenburg. All the honours which George Handel had striven for and attained in royal circles thus fell away at a stroke, and the removal of royal patronage, even by death, was a catastrophe of the utmost magnitude in those days. The silent surgeon of the Schlamm was not content to drop back from the proud position he had fought for. One imagines the varying emotions of depression and hopelessness that passed in succession across his mind, and can picture him daily growing more morose as he had been ever morose, more difficult in the family as he always had been difficult in the family since those days when the burden of his affairs first occupied his every thought. And Anna, dropping a little more into that subservience, that easy slide downhill from the independence she had known as Christoph Oettinger's widow. Handel was disgruntled, his pride was smashed. Then the Halle Council, consisting as it did of many of his enemies, brought a charge against him of intriguing against the late Prince by supplying information about his condition to the Elector of Brandenburg, who had become the successor. They tried to harass Handel in Halle; perhaps they hoped to drive out so gloomy a person from their midst. But with the tough courage, which he eventually passed on to his son, the barber-surgeon refused to budge an inch. A little later his health began to fail. Possibly it was only a mental miasma that had caught him, a melancholia provoked by the agitation at the loss of his honours. He took a bold step; he wrote to the famous Privy-Councillor von Dancklemann. "I wish," he said, " to thank you herewith most humbly and obediently to pray, to be so gracious, as I am an old most humble servant, and according to the will of God have only to live one or two years, that on the occasion of the present visit of His Electoral Highness (to Halle) I may receive the document,' "i.e. the renewal of the appointment to the various offices he held.1 or It may have been the humility of his letter-had the pompous old fellow ever grovelled so completely before it may have been out of pity for an old servant of the Court, 1 Opel. but the Elector gave back to the barber-surgeon all the honours he had lost. Once again George Handel became surgeon to the Court, at first without salary. Hardly had he been reappointed than he was suddenly taken ill. He grew worse. Would that life remaining to him, which he had said had but one year, two years to run, pass out so soon? They prayed for him in the churches; the Superintendent Olearius, his confessor and a distant relative, came and administered the last Sacrament. It was obvious that the old barber-surgeon was dying. Then came an amazing change. He rallied. This man, whom they believed to be gasping out his last breath, was suddenly found walking about in his room. Death! Who had spoken of death? There was so much he had to do, so much for him to think about, and Death could not interrupt these things. His recovery was a sheer achievement of willpower-the will-power that hustled Death away even as it peeped in at the bedroom door. He flung aside the leech, he dispensed with Superintendent Olearius, and a surprised town saw him suddenly appear, a white, slow-moving ghost, towards his seat in the Liebfrauenkirche and drop painfully to his knees, till only the shower of silver hair was visible above the pew. For long he knelt thus, thanking his Maker for his new lease of life. Honour was restored, a new sense of ease and achievement crept into the Handel establishment, and probably no one felt the relief more than Anna. Only for a space did Fate allow the barber-surgeon any respite. Scarcely a year after the new distinction had been given, Anna Handel died suddenly. If the barber-surgeon was stupefied by the blow he did not show it. His life went on imperturbably as before. He buried her without a coffin, without any ceremonial whatever, just as if he were hiding in the ground some finished thing that had once been a piece of his home. In his later years he had not shown the adoration for Anna which he had when she was Oettinger's widow. Now that she had gone he picked up the threads of his life, no more solitary for her loss. But a cornerstone had been knocked out of the domestic edifice which had grown about him and become so accommodating to his |