facto Churches, they reply; like the governments of England and France. That allegation will not serve you here, is the Catholic rejoinder; "you are not in the Apostolic Church." It is manifest that upon such a plea, the Apostolical exclusive Church has to be proved, by whatever argument, whether it rests on spiritual grounds or on specific appointment. The usual proof adopted is to cite the Church, as it existed in the third and a few subsequent centuries, and the language which it held respecting itself. The Church was then a single body, we are told. It had a recognised chief, whatever may have been his powers. It acknowledged one supreme government, a general council, whose due it was to be universally obeyed. That government could and did lay down the truth with infallible certainty. It stood over against the secular world as a single society. It treated with that secular power as equal with equal. It maintained a supremacy in things spiritual as real and as authoritative as that which the State exercised in temporal matters. It says of itself that it is infallible, when it speaks through its proper organ. It declares that its ministers are the only lawful ministers, and it points to an unbroken descent of bishops from the Apostolic age. It proclaims that it alone possesses the sacraments, which Christ undeniably instituted; and it tells all other Christian societies that they are no part of the real Christian Church at all. So says Mr. Ffoulkes, as we understand him, so says Dr. Pusey to the Church Union, and so says every High Churchman. But, if nothing more can be alleged in support of this exclusive title to legitimacy in behalf of the Episcopal Church, what is this but purely and simply to stand upon de facto ground? All that is here urged, could be urged, and was urged, in behalf of the Stuarts and the Bourbons; yet it has not prevented the universal sense of mankind from condemning the divine right of these dynasties as an illusion and a chimera. The language held by the Catholic Church of these times respecting its own authority and the wickedness of disobedience to its ordinances, can be paralleled to the letter by the proclamations of monarchs by divine right, the same declarations that it was the will of God that subjects should obey them, the same denunciations of disloyalty, the same assertions that it was God who placed them in authority, the same curses against schisms, insurrections, and new governments, as rebellion against God. There is no difference. Nay, the similarity of the two positions, thanks to Mr. Ffoulkes, we can say is yet more wonderful. Just as the Bourbon and Stuart dynasties have disappeared, although each possesses a living representative, so the One Catholic Church, except as the collective aggregate of all Christians, has come to an end. There is no One Catholic Church, as a definite society, now existent on earth; no body, as Mr. Ffoulkes

observes, which dares arrogate to itself to be that body, no executive organ, no voice to govern and to declare the truth. Broken fragments are all that remain of it-fragments which obey different rulers, which profess different doctrines, which chant different Creeds, which are as distinct as France is from England. If there ever was One Catholic Church, in the sense put on the expression by High Churchmen, it belongs to the past, to the time when Europe was politically one under the Roman Empire, and consequently furnished facilities for one single Christian society. This is the fatal fact which Mr. Ffoulkes preaches to all Catholic theories. It vindicates and establishes the perfect completeness and legitimacy of all Christian Churches, whether Episcopal or not. It places them on the same level of right as that which despotisms, republics, and constitutional governments, whether inherited by descent or set up by revolution, possess in the civil world, where antiquity and long tenure are worthless to found exclusive right. It does not follow that all Church societies are constructed with equal wisdom, or produce results of equal excellence. Long existence, the record of a continuous chain of great deeds, the memories of great men, the training and education conferred by the examples and the principles derived from a long line of ages, these, and other merits such as these, may confer great superiority on one form of Church rule, as compared with another; but they are utterly powerless to supply a foundation of exclusive legitimacy. There is one God for all men, one Ruler, one Fountain of all authority, religious and secular; but there are many societies, ecclesiastical and temporal, which all partake of the same stream of legitimacy, as it flows from the common Source. To build society in the religious world on essentially different principles from those which underlie its existence in the civil, is to violate the most essential truth of all religion-that it exists alike in every thought and every act.

BONAMY PRICE.

IT may

sound like an anachronism to call Handel a contemporary; and yet he seems so constantly present with us, that at times we can hardly believe that he has passed away. We are surrounded by his effigies; no living face is more familiar-no modern minstrel more beloved than he who has now lain quietly in the great Abbey for some one hundred and ten years.

A few hours after death, the sculptor Roubiliac took a cast of his face that dead face made alive again, and wrought into imperishable marble, is indeed the very face of Handel. There, towering above his tomb, towering, too, above the passing generations of men, he seems to accept their homage benignly, like a god, whilst he himself stands wrapt from the "fickle and the frail," and "moulded in colossal calm."

The frequenters of Exeter Hall are familiar with another figure of him clothed in a long robe, with the legs crossed, and holding a lyre in his hand. A marble bust of the same date (1738) is at the Foundling Hospital. The head is shaven and crowned with a sort of turban cap; the face is irascible and highly characteristic. Casts of this bust have been multiplied through the land, and can be easily

obtained.

The original of what is perhaps the best known of all (1758) is in the Queen's private apartments at Windsor. The little china bust

sold at all music shops is a fair copy; on either side of the face falls down a voluminous wig elaborately wrought. The sculptor seems to have felt he could no more dare to treat that wig lightly than some other persons whom we shall have to refer to by-and-by.

There are more than fifty known portraits of Handel, and the best of them happens to be also the best known. It is by T. Hudson, signed "1756 A," at Gopsall, the seat of his remarkable friend, Charles Jennens. Handel is seated in full and gorgeous costume of the period, with sword, shot-silk breeches, gorge de pigeon, embroidered with gold. The face is noble in its repose; a touch of kindly benevolence plays about the finely-shaped mouth; every trace of angry emotion seems to have died out; yet the lines of age that are somewhat marked do not rob the countenance of its strength. The great master wears the mellow dignity of years without weakness or austerity.

In that wonderful collection of pictures lately exhibited at the South Kensington Museum, the often-recurring face and figure of Handel-young, middle-aged, and old-life-size, full figure, head and shoulders, standing up, and sitting down-filled us with the sense of one who had left a deep and yet bewildering impression upon his own age. The portraits were not only different in look, but even in features. As we passed, with a feeling that at length we had seen Handel all round, to the miniature room, we were once more surprised to find the same face subjected to the minute photographic treatment of Denner, or the robust handling of Wolfand, who makes the composer fat, rosy, and in excellent condition. There are few collectors of prints who have not a lithograph, woodcut, or line engraving of him. He is exposed in every second-hand printshop, still hangs on the walls of many old nook-and-corner houses in London, or lies buried in unnumbered portfolios throughout England.

With such memories fresh in our minds, and with the melodious thunders of the great Festival still ringing in our ears, let us attempt to trace once more the history of Handel's life, and hang another wreath upon the monument of his imperishable fame.

I.

Händel or Handel, (George Frederic), was born at Halle, on the Saale, in the duchy of Magdeburg, Lower Saxony. The date on his tomb in Westminster Abbey is a mistake (Feb. 24, 1684); his real birthday is Feb. 23, 1685.

Germany was not then the great musical country which it has since become, and was chiefly engaged in cultivating second-hand

the flowers of Italian music, which grew pale enough beneath those alien skies.

The Italian maestro might be looked upon with some respect, but the native artist was not yet considered a prophet in his own country. Even eighty years later Mozart and Haydn were treated like lacqueys. "Music," remarked Handel's father, about 170 years ago, "is an elegant art and fine amusement, but as an occupation it hath little dignity, having for its object nothing better than mere entertainment and pleasure.'

No wonder the boy Handel, who, from his earliest childhood, seems to have been passionately fond of sweet sounds, encountered opposition and disappointment in his early musical endeavours. He was to go to no concerts, not even to a public school, for fear he should learn the gamut. He must be taught Latin at home, and become a good doctor, like his father; and leave the divine art to Italian fiddlers and mountebanks. But up in a little garret the child of seven years, perhaps with the connivance of his nurse or his mother, had hidden a dumb spinet-even at night the faint tinkling could not be heard down below-and in stolen hours, without assistance of any kind, we are told the boy taught himself to play. By-and-by Father Handel has a mind to visit another son in the service of the Duke of Saxe-Weisenfels, and little George runs after the carriage and begs so hard to go, that at last he is taken to the ducal palace. But he soon turns out to be an enfant terrible to his poor old father. He is caught playing the chapel organ, and is brought up before the duke, trembling more, no doubt, at his father than at the duke, who has heard him, and now pats him on the back with bravo!" Then, turning to his enraged and afflicted parent, he tells him that his son is a genius, and must not be snubbed any more. The boy's fear is now exchanged for the wildest delight, and the father's rage is quickly followed by astonishment. Handel would often tell the story in after years; and he never forgot the duke, the kindest, because the earliest of his benefactors.

From this moment fortune seemed to smile upon him, and his early career exhibits a combination of circumstances wonderfully favourable to the orderly development of his genius. Severe training, patronage, and encouragement, ardent friendship, the constant society of the first composers, wholesome rivalry, and regular orchestral practice all seem to be suddenly poured upon him out of fortune's great horn of plenty. As the favourite pupil of the great Halle organist, Zachau, he analyzes at the outset very nearly the whole existing mass of German and Italian music, and is set to write a cantata or motett once a week. At last the good Zachau has not the conscience to put him through any more fugues; tells him with