If the visitor to London will walk up Bond Street and turn left into Brook Street, he will find a building on the lefthand side bearing a plaque stating that George Frederick Handel once lived there. Handel did live there for thirty-four years, paying £35 a year rent for the place. He composed his greatest works there. In a front room on the first floor he composed Messiah, and in that selfsame room, exactly eighteen years after the Dublin production of Messiah, he died on Good Friday, April 13,1759, leaving a legacy of the richest music to the world.
Had the visitor been able to look into that room in the year 1757, he would have found a blind old man at his table, smoking his churchwarden, awaiting the arrival of his amanuensis, John Christopher Smith, to take down some of the music which was flowing through his mind. His