After all, it was only in the day of Handel that the Bishop of London decided for us that oratorios should no more be acted. How do we know that, if things continue to go forward along the present lines, we shall not have a later bishop determining that the oratorio ought to be acted and thereby excluded from the hallowed precincts of famous cathedral towns? Then the censorious throng which has looked askance upon the New World performances of "Parsifal" would find that panorama of a young pilgrim's progress as innocuous as one of the "Four Serious Songs" of Brahms. To those who watch with some solicitude the march of musical progress, it looks as if we were in the midst of a transition in the world of oratorio. A very peaceful transition, indeed, it is; for we are no longer to be excited by a comparison of Handel with other masters. We care not a pinch of snuff whether Coleridge-Taylor be a genius or not. We go once a year to hear "The Messiah," and occasionally we remember with a sort of mild surprise that Handel also wrote "Israel in Egypt." When Mr. Elgar comes along with his revolutionary notions, compounded of Carissimi, Handel, Mendelssohn, and Wagner, we view them with a placidity which would be amusing were it not so stupid. The times have changed, indeed, since Gray wrote to Swift, on Feb. 23, 1723:-- "As for the reigning amusement of the town, it is entirely music; real fiddles, bass viols and hautboys; not poetical harps, lyres and reeds. There's nobody allowed to say 'I sing' but an eunuch or an Italian woman. Everybody is grown now as great a judge of music as they were in your time of poetry, and folks that could not distinguish one tune from another now daily dispute about the different styles of Handel, Bononcini and Attilio. People have forgot Homer and Virgil and Cæsar; or at least, they have lost their ranks. For in London and Westminster, in all polite conversations, Senesino is daily voted to be the greatest man that ever lived." True, this pother was all anent opera, which even to this day evokes a considerable gush of invalid comment about glorified tenors and sopranos. At least the men of the opera to-day are actually masculine, but there is an echo of the Handelian period in the adoration of tenors. But that, as the pleasant Mr. Kipling was wont to say in his pleasantest tales, is another story. It was but a flight of years till London town cackled as busily about Handel's oratorios as it had about his operas. A private letter from London, printed in Faulkner's Journal (Dublin) of March 12, 1743, said:--