Vain resolve! For Handel, crushed, had a most persistent habit of rising again. If political cabals brought him low, the tides of national politics brought him to the top once more. “Messiah”, to be sure, was not to become an unshakable British (shall we not rather say Anglo-Saxon) monument till after the composer’s death; yet Handel was able to make the most, creatively, of the great national emergencies of his last decade. In 1743, as Composer of Music to the Chapel Royal, he wrote a “Te Deum” and an anthem to celebrate the victory of Dettingen, music that conquered the popular heart. To this period belongs the charming secular oratorio, “Semele”, (source of the beloved airs “Where’er you walk” and “O Sleep, why dost thou leave me?”) at the first production of which Mrs. Delany found it significant that “there was no disturbance in the playhouse.” But the old habit of launching operatic or concert enterprises was upon him once more and again threatened to consume his credit and his substance. Bankruptcy threatened. Other oratorios, “Hercules”, “Belshazzar”, grand masterpieces both of them, were given in 1745 to dwindling audiences. Handel’s health was imperiled. Then came 1745, the Jacobite rising and the landing in Scotland of the Pretender, Charles Edward. There was consternation which culminated in the march of the Highlander army on London. Loyally, the composer identified himself with the national cause; to celebrate the early defeats of the Jacobites he wrote the “Occasional Oratorio”, a call to Englishmen to resist the invader. But this occupies a less considerable niche in history than “Judas Maccabaeus”, next to “Messiah” perhaps the most popular of Handel’s oratorios, unless we choose to set above it the earlier “Israel in Egypt”—to Robert Schumann “the model of a choral work.” “Judas Maccabaeus”, the text of which a certain divine, Thomas Morell, had based on the Old Testament, was set by Handel between July 9 and August 11, 1746, was produced by Handel at Covent Garden, April 1, 1747. The composer was extraordinarily attuned to the emotional mood of the moment. People saw in the heroic Judas an embodiment of the victorious Duke of Cumberland, who had ferociously scattered the hosts of the Pretender. And the Jews of London, proud of the glorification of their warrior hero of old, rallied to Handel’s support and packed the theatre in such numbers that the composer suddenly found himself with a wholly new public at his feet, which to some degree replaced for a time to come the aristocratic patrons he had lost. [Illustration: HANDEL’S HOUSE, 1875. Handel lived here—then 57 Lower Brook Street, Hanover Square—for 34 years, 1725 till his death in 1759; “Messiah” was composed within its walls.]