Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/63

Rh a doctor of Oxford University, although the degree was offered to him. It is recorded that he complained: "What the devil! should I have had to spend my money in order to be like those idiots? Never in this world!"

And later, in Dublin, where he was entitled Dr. Händel on a placard, he was annoyed by the mistake and promptly had it corrected on the programmes, which announced him as Mr. Händel.

Although he was far from turning up his nose at fame—speaking at some length in his last will and testament of his burial at Westminster, and carefully settling the amount to which he wished to limit the cost of his own monument—he had no respect whatever for the opinions of the critics. Mattheson was unable to obtain from him the data which he needed to write his biography. His Rousseau-like manners filled the courtiers with indignation. The fashionable folk who had always been given to inflicting boredom upon artists without any protest from the latter resented the supercilious and unsociable fashion in which he kept them at a distance. In 1719 the field-marshal Count Flemming wrote to Mlle. de Schulenburg, one of Händel's pupils: