But Handel did not go to France. Instead, he returned to Germany and went to Hanover. Prince Ernest had, in Venice, been completely captivated by “Agrippina” and repeated an invitation he had made once before. The worthy Steffani invited the “dear Saxon” to succeed him as Kapellmeister at the Hanoverian Court. Wisely, “the dear Saxon” accepted. How differently things might have turned had he not been in Venice at just that providential moment! So Handel, as Chrysander said, “walked in the steps of Steffani; but his feet were larger.” [Illustration: Showing Handel’s handwriting and signature when he first came to London.] His stay in Hanover in 1710 was brief. Hardly had he prepared to take up his duties than proposals were made to him from England. He asked leave of absence and received it; accepted an invitation from the Elector Johann Wilhelm to visit his court at Düsseldorf; and then, by way of Holland, traveled to London, which he reached late in 1710, unable to speak a word of English. Before he had gone back to the Hanoverian Court he had written an opera, produced it amid prodigious enthusiasm and taken the first steps toward becoming a sovereign British institution. * * * He could not have timed his coming better. Purcell’s death sixteen years earlier had given what was something like a death blow to English music; and what now passed for native compositions amounted to pitiable odds and ends. Rolland ridicules the claim of some unthinking people that Handel “killed English music since there was nothing left to kill.” A renewal of the Puritanical opposition which poisoned the English stage contributed to the confusion and discouragement of British artists, and the worst of such attacks as the notorious Jeremy Collier had made on the “profaneness and immorality” of the theatre lay in the fact that, as such things often do, they expressed the deep feelings of the nation. In consequence of a universal hypocrisy foreign elements came to fill the vacuum created. Some bad Italian librettos were set to wretched music and served up with momentary success. Other “entertainments” of the sort mingled Italian and English words and were duly satirized by the jealous and priggish Joseph Addison, nettled by the failure of his own piece, “Rosamund”, to which one Thomas Clayton had composed atrocious music.