The British Quarterly Review Author:Robert Vaughan Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: It is not to be hoped, amidst existing diversities of culture, that we shall not be judged by some to have assigned too high an importance to these, or to any po... more »ssible embodiments of religious truth in musical forms. It need imply no disrespect to the habits and temperaments which so largely help to form judgments of this kind, if we decline to reason with them. They will certainly not be confirmed by many persons amongst the thousands who will be listening to the noblest works of Handel while our comments on them are; passing through the press. The 'Life of Handel,' by M. Schoalcher, is curious as the production of an enthusiastic political refugee, knowing nothing of musical science, from a martial nation which knows nothing of Handel, except ' See, the conquering hero comes!' The book appeared two years before the Handel Centenary in 1859, and did much to widen an intelligent interest in that event. The field was still open for a critical biography, and this want is being well supplied in the work of Dr. Chrysander, the learned secretary of the German Handel Society. The third volume, which was promised for 1861, has not yet reached us ; but the two first volumes, bringing the narrative down to 1740, are notable specimens of German thoroughness and critical acumen. The errors of previous writers go down in great shocks before the sickle, and the story of Handel is finally cleared of heaps of traditionary trash. The collation of the two biographies shows, further, the advantage possessed by a cultivated musician in such a labour. That our own historians of the great composer are superseded by a Frenchman and a German does not seem to us a matter for regret. There is room on this grave for immortelles and Denkzeichen ; and we gladly see about it a representative congress of gr...« less