It is neither here nor there, that “Father” Bach left little money and many children when he died, and that the sons seized upon his MSS. and drifted away to other cities, leaving the mother and three daughters to live upon the charity of the town.  It is unfortunate to have to include among the ungrateful children the stepson, Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach, who seems otherwise to have been a pleasant enough fellow, a fair family man, and a great composer.  He first too much eclipsed his father’s fame, and has since been too much eclipsed thereby.  He had family troubles, too, and left a wife and children to mourn him.  So much for the Bachs.

A family of almost equal fame was the group of violin makers of Cremona, the Stradivari.  The founder of the house, Antonio, began his life romantically enough.  When he was a youngster of seventeen or eighteen, he fell in love with Francesca Capra, a widow of a man who had been assassinated.  She was nine or ten years older than Stradivari, and they were married on July 4, 1667.  In the following December the first of their six children was born.  Two of his sons took up their father’s trade.  Both of them died bachelors, and the third son became a priest.

At the age of fifty-eight Francesca died.  After a year of widowerhood, he wedded again; this time, a woman fourteen or fifteen years younger than he.  She bore him five children, and he outlived her less than a year.  His descendants dwelt for generations, flourishing on his fame, at Cremona.

The Amati were also a numerous family of luthiers, as were the Guarnieri, but I have not been able to poke into their private affairs, though he who called himself “Jesus,” was addicted to imprisonment, and is said to have made violins out of bits of wood brought him by the jailer’s daughter.  She sold the fiddles to buy him luxuries.

But now, lest we should too firmly believe that music exerts an amorous and domestic effect, we are confronted with the ponderous majesty of one of the proudest spirits that ever strode the creaking earth, Georg Friedrich Haendel, who was born the very same year as the much-married Bach, but led a life as opposite as North Pole from South.  The first snub he dealt to Cupid, was when he was eighteen, and sought the post of organist held by the famous old Buxtehude, who had married years before the daughter of an organist to whose post he aspired, and had left behind him a daughter thirty-four years old as an incumbrance upon his successor.  Haendel could have got the job, if he would have had the girl.  But she was almost twice his age, and he left her for another musician to marry in.  Then he went to Italy, and was pursued in vain under those bewitching skies by no belated German spinster, but by a beautiful and attractive Italienne.  Her, he also spurned.  When he was in England, he seems to have come very near falling in love with two different women.  The mother of the first objected to him as a mere