sweats were profuse beyond what can well be imagined. His cure, from the manner as well as the quickness with which it was wrought, passed with the nuns for a miracle. When, but a few hours from the time of his leaving the bath, they heard him at the organ in the principal church, as well as convent, playing in a manner so much beyond what they had ever heard or even imagined, it is not wonderful, that they should suppose the interposition of a higher power.”
He remained, however, some weeks longer at the baths to confirm the cure, thus suddenly effected by means that would have destroyed a frame of less strength and energy. The more cruel ill of blindness fell upon his latest years, but he had already run an Olympian course, and could sit still with the palm and oak crowns upon his brows.
Handel is a Greek in the fullness and summer glow of his nature, in his directness of action and unrepentant steadfastness. I think also with a pleasure, in which I can hardly expect sympathy, since even his simple biographer shrinks from it with the air of “a person of quality,” on the fact that he was fond of good eating, and also ate a great deal. As he was neither epicure nor gourmand, I not only accept the excuse of the biographer, that a person of his choleric nature, vast industry and energy, needed a great deal of sustenance; but it seems to me perfectly in character for one of his large heroic mould. I am aware that these are total abstinence days, especially in the regions of art and romance; but the Greeks were wiser and more beautiful, if less delicate than we; and I am strongly reminded by all that is said of Handel, of a picture painted in their golden age. The subject was Hercules at the court of Admetus; in the background handmaids are mourning round the corpse of the devoted Alceste, while in the foreground the son of Jove is satisfying what seem to his attendants an interminable hunger. They are heaping baskets, filling cans, toiling up the stairs with huge joints of meat; the hero snaps his fingers, impatient for the new course, though many an empty trencher bears traces of what he has
