a doctor of Oxford University, although the degree was offered to him. It is recorded that he complained: "What the devil! should I have had to spend my money in order to be like those idiots?[1] Never in this world!"
And later, in Dublin, where he was entitled Dr. Händel on a placard, he was annoyed by the mistake and promptly had it corrected on the programmes, which announced him as Mr. Händel.
Although he was far from turning up his nose at fame—speaking at some length in his last will and testament of his burial at Westminster, and carefully settling the amount to which he wished to limit the cost of his own monument—he had no respect whatever for the opinions of the critics. Mattheson was unable to obtain from him the data which he needed to write his biography. His Rousseau-like manners filled the courtiers with indignation. The fashionable folk who had always been given to inflicting boredom upon artists without any protest from the latter resented the supercilious and unsociable fashion in which he kept them at a distance. In 1719 the field-marshal Count Flemming wrote to Mlle. de Schulenburg, one of Händel's pupils:
Mademoiselle!—I had hoped to speak to M. Händel and should have liked to offer him a few polite attentions on your behalf, but there has been no opportunity; I made use of your name to induce him to come to my house, but on some occasions he was not at home, while on others he was ill; it seems to me that he is rather crazy, which he ought not to be as far as I am concerned, considering that I am a musician … and that I am proud to be one of your most faithful servants, Mademoiselle, who are the most agreeable of his pupils; I should have liked to tell you all this, so that you in your turn might give lessons to your master.[2]
