In the martial, heroic score of “Judas Maccabaeus” Handel had incorporated some music he had originally designed for other works. “See the conquering hero comes”, probably the best known chorus in the oratorio, had originally been a part of “Joshua”, and was not heard in “Judas Maccabaeus” till a year after its first production. Even the chorus “Zion now her head shall raise”, was a later addition and had not been composed till after Handel had lost his sight. This is the place to comment briefly on Handel’s “borrowings” about which so much ado has been made that one writer went so far as to allude to him as “the grand old thief.” It is altogether too easy to lay a disproportionate stress on the practice involved, the more so as it was a fairly legitimate custom in the Eighteenth Century. Besides Handel, masters like Bach, Haydn, Gluck, Mozart and even Beethoven, had a way, more or less frequently, of taking their own where they found it. Often, indeed, they found it in their own earlier creations. In any case no moral or ethical question was involved, for the good reason that the _treatment_ of a theme or a melody according to the esthetic of that period, mattered far more than the phrase in question. Handel, when told of some passage from another composer found in his music had a way of retorting: “The pig did not know what to do with such a theme.” Then, too, he adapted to broader purposes music he had conceived earlier in other connections. “Messiah”, for instance, offers many cases in point. The chorus “His yoke is easy, His burthen is light” was adapted for better or worse from an Italian duet composed originally to the words “Quel fior che all’ alba ride”; the great “For unto us a Child is born”, was a madrigal denouncing “Blind Love and Cruel Beauty” thus: “No, di voi non vo’ fidarmi”, while “All we like sheep have gone astray” was at first the Italian duet “So per prova i vostri inganni.” The great ensemble, “And with His Stripes”, employs the same fugal subject which Bach put to use in the A minor fugue of the “Well Tempered Clavier” and is also found in the Kyrie of Mozart’s “Requiem.” But themes of this type were “in the air” in that period and fairly recognized as general property. It would be preposterous to labor too much the points involved—the more so as every now and then the practice is “avenged” (if we like!) by some awkwardness of accent or clumsiness of declamation which results by forcing the older phrase into a newer textual association. Such things are very different from the barefaced claim Bononcini once made to having composed a certain work which, as it transpired, had been written by a minor musician living in Vienna. Then too, in the phrase of W. McNaught, “Handel did not borrow the thoughts of others; he rescued them.” And it must never be forgotten that men like Bach and Handel faced deadlines unthinkable to any musician of today!