With both Frankh and Reutter he had had a hard enough time—­plenty of work, not too much food, and no petting—­but now he learnt what hard times really meant.  He faced them with plenty of courage.  A chorister of St. Michael’s gave him shelter; some warmhearted person—­to whom be all praise—­lent him the vast sum of 140 florins—­say L7; he got a few pupils who paid him two florins a month.  He must have toiled like a slave, in a wet, cold garret, and often without sufficient to eat.  Yet, as in everything he undertook, dogged did it.  He never became a splendid executant, like Bach and Handel before him, and Mozart and Beethoven immediately after, but he must have been head and shoulders above the ordinary musical practitioner.

His first opportunity came when he made the acquaintance of one Felix Kurz, a well-known comic actor, for whom he wrote the comic opera, Der Neue Krumme Teufel.  This, judging from the places it was played at, seems to have had quite a vogue.  The music is lost; I have never seen the words.  But through this operetta or pantomime with songs he appears to have been introduced to Metastasio, who was, of course, a mighty great man at that epoch—­a kind of Scribe.  Anyhow, Metastasio was superintending the education of the two daughters of a Spanish family, the de Martines, and Haydn was engaged to teach the elder music.  Metastasio brought him to the notice of Porpora—­then quite as important a person as Metastasio himself—­and Porpora made Haydn an offer.  Haydn was to clean the boots and do other household jobs, and he was to accompany when Porpora gave lessons.  In return, he was to have lessons from Porpora and to be fed and clothed.  He accepted, and went off with his new master to Mannersdorf.

His service with Porpora brought him innumerable advantages.  If he had lowly duties to attend to, that amounted to nothing.  He lived in the eighteenth century, not in the nineteenth or twentieth.  He was not regarded as a clever musician forced to do lackey’s work; he was a lackey—­or, at least, a peasant—­given a chance of making himself a clever musician.  In those days birth and breeding counted for much—­everything.  If a man could not boast of these, then he must have money; and even money would not always fetch him everything.  The Court musicians were classed lower than domestic servants, and generally paid less.  Now and again a triumphant, assertive personality like Handel would break through all the rules of etiquette; but even Handel could have done little without his marvellous finger-skill—­for he was reckoned finest amongst the European players of his time—­and with his fingers Haydn—­we have his own confession for it—­was never extraordinary.  He could not extemporise as Handel, and Bach in more restricted circles, had done, nor as Mozart and Beethoven were soon to do.  Beethoven won social status for the musician tribe, but Beethoven, while as brilliant an executant as Handel, also had the advantage of