People say the generous British public supported Handel. It did nothing
of the kind. On the contrary, for some 30 years it did its best to ruin
him, twice drove him to bankruptcy, badgered him till in 1737 he had a
paralytic seizure which was as near as might be the death of him and, if
he had died then, we should have no _Israel_, nor _Messiah_, nor
_Samson_, nor any of his greatest oratorios. The British public only
relented when he had become old and presently blind. Handel, by the way,
is a rare instance of a man doing his greatest work subsequently to an
attack of paralysis. What kept Handel up was not the public but the
court. It was the pensions given him by George I and George II that
enabled him to carry on at all. So that, in point of fact, it is to
these two very prosaic kings that we owe the finest musical poems the
world knows anything about.