and find fame in the doubtful ways of music, she never understood what it meant. This son was to grow up and depart from her, and would, in the fullness of time, send short messages of affection to her from his sanctuary in England. But, having no knowledge of music, she never realised his worth. He ultimately became to her a being she had created and sent forth into some strange vortex of public life. She always cared for him, though he departed from her for ever when just emerging from his teens, and when she died Death dealt the greatest blow to this son that his life ever knew.

From the time that the christening party left the Liebfrauenkirche, life for the Handel child was to drop into the common rut of the better-bred Halle children. Ere the year had ended Pastor Taust of Giebichenstein, left weak and ill as he had been by the plague, passed quietly away, and Fräulein Anna came to live with her sister Frau Dorothea Handel at the Schlamm. Her coming banished all question of the child's education in the tender years. Frau Dorothea was occupied with other cradles. She raised two girls, one of whom was in later years to have the proud knowledge of her brother's achievements. Upon Anna Taust depended the main upbringing of this boy, and his mother, left with the nurture of two tender children, watched the influence of Tante Anna work itself upon this first child she had been able to rear.

Of some things concerning that boy she remained unaware, even though Anna Taust clearly understood them. She did not know of his interest in Church music, she did not see him fascinated by the first dawning understanding of the notes of the organ. He went to the Liebfrauenkirche regularly; to Frau Handel his object in doing so was to serve his Maker as he had been taught to do. That the organ music in the Liebfrauenkirche stood in the place of his Maker to the boy who groped his way to understanding never occurred to her. And, if it had, she was doubtless so shaped in her mental outlook by the creed of her husband that she would probably have sent young George Frideric to one of the lesser places of worship of simple faith which existed in Halle at the time, and at which music was unknown.

It is not easy to understand immediately this dislike of the

THE BAPTISMAL ENTRY IN THE BOOK OF THE LIEBFRAUENKIRCHE AT HALLE. Showing the record of Handel, and proving the year of his birth-1685.

Musical Halle

Handels towards any form of music, without inquiring a little into the life of Halle at the time when George Frideric was in his childhood. Halle was then a small town confined within the radius of its medieval town walls, a town of houses constructed of wood and plaster covered with thatched roofs. As a house fell into disrepair it was pulled down and a new building created out of the remains of the old, with the addition of more modern material. Thus the town kept in its own little circle, with only the suburbs of Glauchau and Neumarkt apart, and it was in the latter that the barber-surgeon had his practice.

Moreover, the people of Halle were severely solitary in their existence. They were situated in the centre of a group of warring tribes, which had fought and triumphed over each other since very early times. Halle was a sort of buffer state ringed about by the denizens of the salt-marshes, a strange people of ancient Wend and Frankish blood, who from the beginning of time had worked the salt wells, and been a law unto themselves—a people so powerful that they were able to support an army of six hundred men. But music had always been an art, ardently pursued and much better practised at Halle than in all Saxony. The glories of the old courts, the moods of successive rulers with the pomps and ceremonies at the old Moritzburg in the town, whence archbishops and princes ruled with rods of iron, had kept song alive throughout Halle. And the glorious memory of Halle's court music, which lasted until shortly before the birth of the child George Frideric, was undoubtedly still alive in the people at the time of his infancy. Many choirs existed in the town at the time when his infant intelligence first began to understand. The town choir, and choirs from the schools-choirs that sang in the streets in front of citizens' houses, and thrived on chance charity cast from the windows to put an end to what was too frequently an irritating noise. Someone was always singing somewhere in public in Halle in those days. Occasionally the singers were given pieces of cloth and a spasmodic education

1 G. F. Hertzberg, "Geschichte der Stadt Halle."

2 Brockhaus, Lexikon "Halloren."

Built 1478 when the Archbishop conquered the town.

4 Dr Weissenborn.

by some ancient charity according to the regularity of their singing. To become musical, therefore, was to ally oneself with a species of street vagrants, to descend in public esteem, and to be the certain occupier of a charitable cubicle as the

end of it all.

Such a prospect for their son jarred badly on the Handels. It was not entirely his fault that the barber-surgeon strove to exterminate, as he might some rank weed, the first interest in music which showed in his son. The Handel pride was considered a God-given gift above music; it had found its birth in a great record of honourable men, and it was not going to slip into the mire of common huckstering of sounds and noises if the old barber-surgeon could help it. Aunt Anna, when she cast aside neutrality and threw all the weight of her sympathies to the child in whom the first knowledge of melody was dawning, who took him to the Liebfrauenkirche that he might listen to a wonderful organ on Sundays, and brought him back again, was risking a great deal in what she did. Had her lack of neutrality been revealed, it is certain that she would not have been tolerated for very long in the Handel household. In aiding this child to understand the meaning of music to the soul, in cultivating that new-born creed in him, she was hiding a secret sin. It is certain that the barbersurgeon did not know, and equally certain that his wife, Dorothea, did not know that the saintly Anna was leading a double life. If she did smuggle in the clavichord for the child, which the biographers will insist upon, then she was a woman of still greater daring than history has ever credited her with possessing. The barber-surgeon was weary of hearing the various choirs sing daily sacred airs in chorus manner and in parts under the conductorship of a Præfectus at stated hours in front of the citizens' houses.1 They were a sort of public nuisance in the Schlamm, the melancholy nuisance familiar in our Christmas waits. Daily repetition may well have urged a certain decision in his mind when thinking about his son: "If that boy ever shows the first inclination towards music or noises disguised as such, I will kill it." And all the while that delightful old maid in his house, Aunt Anna, was deceiv1 G. F. Hertzberg, "Geschichte der Stadt Halle."