In the summer of 1733 Handel went to Oxford. The University authorities had offered him a degree of Doctor of Music. Oxford is said to have known little of his music at that time. Yet his arrival there might, according to Newman Flower, “have been the triumphant entry of a king. The town was overcrowded; even accommodations at the hostels ran out and people slept in the streets.” The composer brought with him a new oratorio, “Athalia”, composed to a text which Samuel Humphreys had adapted from Racine. Hugo Leichtentritt claims that the Rector, Dr. Holmes, aimed to bring about a rapprochement between the Hanoverians and the Jacobites. A whole week of Handelian works was offered, with hearings of “Esther”, “Deborah”, “Athalia”, the Utrecht Te Deum, “Acis and Galatea” and other creations. In the end the master did _not_ receive the honorary degree. Some have believed that he turned it down when he was told it would cost 100 Pounds. Like Haydn half a century after, he found the academic honors of Oxford expensive; and later a story gained currency that Handel had shouted in his particular brand of English: “Vat de dyfil I trow away my money for what de Blockhead wish; I no vant!” Had it been practical he might have brought a whole opera production to Oxford. In place of such a luxury he compromised on oratorios, the more so because the dividing line between such entertainment and the opera of the period was not so sharply drawn as it was eventually to become. The chief differences between the two forms lay in the preponderance of choruses, such as, in opera, were regarded as hardly more than side issues. Meanwhile, he seemed unable to resist the lure of the theatre. Again and again he returned to Italian opera. He continued his earlier partnership with Heidegger; he made trips to Italy and elsewhere and secured new singers (the castrato, Carestini, the prima donna, Strada). His enemies increased in number and power and resorted to the basest tactics imaginable to discredit and injure him. The so-called Opera of the Nobility opened at a playhouse in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, lured his singers away from him by fair means or foul, and by securing the great Farinelli obtained a trump card. Handel (who in time parted company with Heidegger) would burn his fingers the moment his fortunes seemed on the upgrade. Even the weather was against him, what with the Thames freezing over in one of the years that he obstinately returned to opera and cutting down his audiences. He lost money ruinously, he went into bankruptcy, he wore himself out to such a degree that he had a mental and physical breakdown and had to go to the Continent, to Aix-la-Chapelle, for a cure. His amazing resilience of spirit and body helped him back to health and actually encouraged him to make another attempt at an operatic season with his egregious associate, Heidegger, at the King’s Theatre early in 1738, for which he composed his comedy, “Serse.”