"Our friend, Mr. Handel, is very well, and things have taken quite a different turn here from what they did some time past; for the publick will no longer be imposed on by Italian singers and wrong-headed undertakers of bad operas, but find out the merit of Mr. Handel's compositions and English performances. The new oratorio (called Samson) which he composed since he left Ireland, has been performed four times to more crowded audiences than ever were seen; more people being turned away for want of room each night than hath been at the Italian opera." Nevertheless, even in those days there was little enough distinction between the styles of the opera and the oratorio, and not many years before Handel's day there had been none at all. Both opera and oratorio sprang from the same soil and were nurtured by the same fount, the drama of Greece. Cavaliere's "Anima e Corpo" was a delectable theatrical performance, prepared under the direction of a very good man, St. Philip Neri, with the laudable aim of drawing young persons away from the vulgar secular shows of Rome in the dawn of the seventeenth century. Like "Die Zauberflöte" this oratorio ended with a chorus, "to be sung, accompanied sedately and reverentially by the dance." How deep was the reverence and how reposeful the sedateness may be gathered from the fact that the ballet was "enlivened with capers or _entrechats_." A religious drama it was, this early oratorio, and it battled its way into popularity by the mighty power of music. Its arch-enemy was the old mystery and miracle play, which made of every religious story something more lively than even an oratorio with a ballet enriched with capers. To combat the attractiveness of the popular religious play the oratorio had to cling to the stage, the costume, and the footlights, and it would have been little stranger to read in the time of Carissimi (1582-1672) than it was, in the century before his birth, the famous Coventry bill of expenses, which contains these items. Paid for a pair of gloves for God 2d. Paid for four pairs of angels' wings 2s. 8d. Paid for mending of hell head 6d. Paid for a pound of hemp to mend the angels' heads 4d.