But now, lest we should too firmly believe that music exerts an amorous and domestic effect, we are confronted with the ponderous majesty of one of the proudest spirits that ever strode the creaking earth, Georg Friedrich Händel, who was born the very same year as the much-married Bach, but led a life as opposite as North Pole from South. The first snub he dealt to Cupid, was when he was eighteen, and sought the post of organist held by the famous old Buxtehude, who had married years before the daughter of an organist to whose post he aspired, and had left behind him a daughter thirty-four years old as an incumbrance upon his successor. Händel could have got the job, if he would have had the girl. But she was almost twice his age, and he left her for another musician to marry in. Then he went to Italy, and was pursued in vain under those bewitching skies by no belated German spinster, but by a beautiful and attractive Italienne. Her, he also spurned. When he was in England, he seems to have come very near falling in love with two different women. The mother of the first objected to him as a mere fiddler. After she died, the father invited him into the family, only to be told that the invitation was too late. The other woman, a lady of high degree, offered herself as a substitute for his career, only to be declined with thanks and possibly with a formal statement that "rejection implied no lack of merit." Seeing that these things happened in the eighteenth century, I need not add that both women were romantic enough to go into a decline, and die beautifully. Whatever food music may have been to Händel's greatness, there was another food that rivalled it in his esteem; and that food was the symphonic poetry of the cook. For Händel was almost equally famous both as a composer and a digester. In this he was rivalled by the father of French opera, Lully, who was a gourmand, in spite of the fact that he spent his early life as a kitchen boy. He led his wife a miserable existence on account of his hot temper, his brutality, and his excesses in solid and liquid food. After him came Rameau, who, like Stradivari, fell in love with a widow while he was still in his teens and she well out of hers. He did not wed, however, until he was forty-three, and then he wed an eighteen-year-old girl, who was, they say, a very good woman, and who did her best to make her husband very happy. But he was taciturn, and rarely spoke even to his own family, and spent on them almost less money than words. Another opera composer of the time was Reinhard Keiser. He married a woman who, with her wealth and her voice, rescued his operatic ventures from bankruptcy. These make a rather sordid and unromantic group.