Haendel never married, and seems never even to have been in love, though he was an unusually pious son and a fond brother.

The only time on record when he took a woman into his arms was the occasion when the great singer, Cuzzoni, refused to sing an air of his the way he wished it.  He seized her, and, dragging her to a window, threatened to throw her out, thundering, “I always knew you were a devil, but I’ll show you that I am Beelzebub, the prince of devils.”

Haendel’s greatest love seems to have been for things to eat.  In the memoirs of him, published anonymously [by Doctor Mainwaring] in 1760, the author says that Haendel was “always habituated to an uncommon portion of food and nourishment,” and accuses him of “excessive indulgence in this lowest of gratifications.”

“He certainly paid more attention to it than is becoming in any man; but it is some excuse that Nature had given him so vigorous a constitution, so exquisite a palate, so craving an appetite, that fortune enabled him to obey these calls, and to satisfy these demands of nature....  Had he hurt his health or fortune by indulgences of this kind, they would have been vicious; as he did not, they were at the most indecorous.”

A story is told of him that he once ordered up enough dinner for three.  Noting that the servant dawdled about, Haendel demanded why; the servant answered that he was waiting for the company to come, whereupon Haendel stormed, in his famous broken English, “Den pring up der tinner prestissimo.  I am de gombany.”

In his later years Haendel was not so beautiful as he might have been, and Queen Anne, alluding to his bulk, said that his hands were feet and his fingers toes.  Mrs. Bray, however, says that “in his youth he was the most handsome man of his time.”

Handel resembles Lully somewhat in his reputation for being a lover of the table and a neglecter of womankind.  Schoelcher in his biography states “that not one woman occupies the smallest place in the long career of his life.”  And yet contradicts himself in his very next sentence, for he adds: 

“When he was in Italy a certain lady named Vittoria fell in love with him and even followed him from Florence to Venice.  Burney describes Vittoria as ‘a songstress of talent.’  Fetis calls her the Archduchess Vittoria, but both agree that she was beautiful and that she filled the part of the prima donna in ‘Roderigo,’ his first Italian score.  At that period, and even later, it was not uncommon to find princes and princesses singing in the pieces which were produced at their courts.  Artist or archduchess, either title was enough to turn the head of a young man twenty-four years old; but Haendel disdained her love.  All the English biographers say that he was too prudent to accept an attachment which would have been ruin to both.  This is calumny, for he was never prudent.”

This Vittoria is an interesting problem in romance.  Doctor Mainwaring says that Haendel was Apollo and she Daphne.  Chrysander in his great biography properly notes that the legend has been twisted, and represents here the god as fleeing from the nymph.  Coxe says that Vittoria was “an excellent singer, the favourite mistress of the Grand Duke of Tuscany”—­which gives a decidedly different look to Haendel’s “prudence.”