Page:Rolland - A musical tour through the land of the past.djvu/72

60 of Ophelia, sent him, when his Julius Cæsar was produced, a crown of laurel, with an enthusiastic poem in which she represented him as the greatest of musicians, and also of the English poets of his time. I have already alluded to those fashionable dames who endeavoured, with hateful animosity, to ruin him. Händel went his own way, indifferent to worshippers and adversaries alike.

In Italy, when he was twenty years of age, he had a few temporary love affairs, traces of which survive in several of the Italian Cantatas. There is a rumour too of an affair which he is supposed to have had at Hamburg when he was second violin in the orchestra of the Opera. He was attracted by one of his pupils, a girl of good family, and wanted to marry her; but the girl's mother declared that she would never consent to her daughter's marriage with a cat-gut scraper. Later, when the mother was dead and Händel famous, it was suggested to him that the obstacles were now removed; but he replied that the time had gone by; and according to his friend, Schmidt, who, like a good romantic German, delights to embellish history, "the young lady fell into a decline that ended her days." In London a little later there was a fresh project of marriage with a lady in fashionable society; once more, she was one of his pupils; but this aristocratic person wanted him to abandon his profession. Händel, indignant, "broke off the relations which would have fettered his genius." Hawkins tells