The Foundling Asylum was a pride and pleasure to Handel in his declining years. He presented it with a new organ, opened it himself with a performance of “Messiah” on May 1, 1750, when countless persons of distinction had to be turned away since the Asylum chapel accommodated only 1,000. From that time on the master saw to it that the oratorio was sung there every year and that the proceeds, always considerable, were donated to the Hospital. Not to be behind his great associate, the artist, Hogarth, who subsequently shared with Handel the governorship, donated a portrait he had painted to the Hospital, raffled it off and gave the proceeds to the Asylum. The composer went one last time to Halle and arrived in Germany, Rolland points out, just at the time his greatest contemporary, Bach, died in Leipzig. His own health was deteriorating, though his mind remained clear and his brain active. To be sure his sight had begun to trouble him. Yet when Thomas Morell, in January, 1751, gave him a libretto, “Jephtha”, he set to work composing it at once. He who had turned out the sublimities of “Messiah” in four weeks and the martial grandeurs of “Judas Maccabaeus” in even less had, however, to break off for ten days after the opening _Largo_ of the chorus “How dark, O Lord, are Thy ways.” And he painfully set down on the manuscript: “I reached here on Wednesday, February 13, had to discontinue on account of the sight of my left eye.” On his 66th birthday (February 23) he wrote “Feel a little better. Resumed work” and set the words “Grief follows joy as night the day.” Then he stopped for four months and did not complete the whole score till the end of August, 1751. The last four numbers had taken him more time than he usually spent on an entire oratorio. By that time he had gone completely blind. Two years later he regained control of himself, played the organ at twelve oratorio productions he gave annually in Lent. He was, even, with the assistance of his pupil and secretary, John Christopher Smith, son of an old Halle school friend, to compose some more music and to remodel his old Italian oratorio, “The Triumph of Time and Truth.” He had submitted to the care of a notorious quack, the “opthalmiater” Chevalier John Taylor, who then enjoyed an extensive vogue among distinguished patients and who boasted that he had seen, on his travels, “a vast variety of singular animals, such as dromedaries, camels, etc., and particularly at Leipsick, where a celebrated master of musick (Bach) already arrived to his 88th year (sic!) received his sight by my hands.” In any case, the different physicians hid nothing from their patient. His case was hopeless, he was afflicted with “gutta serena”. With his sight his best source of inspiration was gone.