This vocalist is remembered in our day as one of England’s greatest singers, especially at Handel commemorations. “Handel,” Anna Seward said, “is as absolute a monarch of the human passions as Shakespeare.” . . . “Were Handel living, I should approach and address him with much more awe than any merely good sort of body upon the throne of England.” . . . “Poetry itself, though so much the elder science, for music has been a science only since the harmonic combinations were discovered, possesses not a more inherent empire over the passions than music, of which Handel is the mighty master; than whom ‘Nothing went before so great, And nothing greater can succeed.’” . . . “Milton knew music scientifically, and felt all its powers. To Samuel Johnson, the sweetest airs and most superb harmonies were but unmeaning noises. {39} I often regret that Milton and Handel were not contemporaries; that the former knew not the delight of hearing his own poetry heightened as Handel has heightened it.” The poetess thought that “The contemptible rage for novel-reading is a pernicious and deplorably prevalent taste, which vitiates and palls the appetite for literary food of a more nutritive and wholesome kind. . . . I am well assured, that novels and political tracts are the only things generally read.” . . . Though disavowing a propensity to read and to love novels, yet she always considered the “Clarissa” and “Grandison” of Richardson—“glorious Richardson” she calls him—as the highest efforts of genius in our language, next to Shakespeare’s plays. She abjured the coarse, unfeeling taste of those who preferred Fielding’s romances to the glories of the Richardsonian pen. In 1792 she wrote that “the London papers had no authority for saying that I was writing a novel. The design of framing such a composition never occurred to me; though I am well aware that novels and political tracts are the only things generally read. If I could write like Richardson, I would turn novelist; but then my work would be too good to be popular;—for how is Richardson neglected!” Mr. Andrew Lang, at the festival this year of the Royal Literary Fund, stated that the only literary people who prospered were “the novelist and the gentleman who remembered many people in his reminiscences. The essayist was no longer in favour. He had been killed by fiction and photographs. It was the purpose of the Royal Literary Fund to aid authors who needed assistance, and all who were not novelists did need it.” It seems that the public, a hundred years ago, had the same taste as the public of to-day! It is novels, novels, novels, which alone satisfy their appetites, when they feed on books!