Even before his death Bach knew that the forms and style of music which he had given his life to perfect and ennoble were already of the past. That he invented a simple system of temperament in order to afford himself the harmonic freedom necessary to his expression, or that he devised a system of fingering which considerably facilitated the playing of his difficult music, does not constitute him the progenitor of the new style of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The composers who followed him knew little or nothing of his music. They were far less likely to appropriate what they might have found useful in his old-fashioned art, than to meet the problems inherent in the new, which they served, with their own ingenuity. Accept, if you like, Scarlatti as the founder of the modern pianoforte style; Couperin as the creator of the salon piece. The fugue had had its great day, and so had the suite. The flawless counterpoint of Bach, with its involutions and its smoothness, was of too compact a substance to serve the adolescent, transparent sonata. His harmonies were too rich and fluent. And Bach had been but once the Bach of the Goldberg Variations. No; Bach’s harpsichord music attained perfection. A river flowed into the sea. Further than this no art can go. Where a parallel excellence seems since to have been achieved, the growth of which it was the ultimate perfection was from another root. Bach is hardly more the father of Beethoven, Schumann and Chopin, than Praxiteles is the father of Michelangelo, or Sophocles of Shakespeare. But he left a standard in music of the complete mastery and welding of all the elements which make an art everlasting,--of form, of texture, of noble and impassioned emotion. And by virtue of this standard which he fixed, he has exercised over the development of music down to the present day a greater spiritual influence than that of any other single composer. The harpsichord works of his great contemporary Handel are far less significant. Several sets of suites were published in London between 1720 and 1735, also six fugues for organ or harpsichord. In the third suite of the first set (1720) there is an air and variations. In the fifth of the same series is the so-called ‘Harmonious Blacksmith,’ the best known of his works for the harpsichord. It is a theme and variations. The air and variations in B-flat major which has served as the groundwork of a great cycle of variations by Brahms constitutes the first number of the second series (1733). There are in other suites a _Passacaglia_ and two _Chaconnes_, all of which are monotonous series of variations. One _Chaconne_ has no less than sixty-two varied repeats. In these works Handel shows little ingenuity. His technical formulas are conventional and in general uninteresting. The dance movements of the suites are worthier of a great composer.