That the full greatness of a man is only revealed when misfortune overtakes him was to be demonstrated by Handel at this trying time. His latest operas he wrote for the sake of the money. One of them, "_Serse_" (Xerxes), which was completed in the year 1738, marks what was very nearly the saddest time in his life. In order to redeem his word of honor and save himself from a debtor's prison, he worked with immoderate energy and yet with meagre material results. When he now found himself in the most pressing need, his friends advised him to give a benefit concert, a thing which Handel had never wished to engage in; on the contrary, he had often expressed himself with harshness against that sort of begging. All the more bitter was it for him that he must after all resort to it at last. On the twenty-eighth of March, 1738, in the week before Easter, the concert took place at the Haymarket Theatre. No oratorio was given by Handel on this occasion, but only a number of Italian and English songs, to which he added an organ concerto of his own composition. The interest excited was far beyond all expectation--the house so crowded that places had to be provided on the stage itself for five hundred illustrious auditors, and the receipts from the concert were estimated at eight hundred pounds. But, while Handel was thus struggling with all his might for his own existence, he had always time and strength to spare for his suffering fellow men. The brilliant successes attained by musicians within the last twenty years had allured many persons into the paths of art, who expected to acquire therein honor and riches, yet were not endowed by nature with the necessary gifts. They had therefore soon suffered shipwreck and fallen into poverty. Two English musicians, Festing and Greene, devised the plan of forming an aid society for indigent musical artists. Handel immediately entered into the project and rendered invaluable assistance to the society by performing for its benefit, on the twentieth of March, 1739, his "Alexander's Feast" and a newly composed organ concerto, on the twenty-eighth of March, 1740, "Acis and Galatea," and on the fourteenth of March, 1741, a series of minor compositions. And here let it be said that the inhabitants of London, even if they had shown themselves for a time somewhat indifferent to his music, still continued faithful in their veneration for the man. In 1738, Tyers, the proprietor of Vauxhall Gardens, determined to erect in them a statue of Handel, and the universal applause which this act excited proved that it was an expression of the sentiment of the people.