composer, and made him a present. London, too, had heard of him, and was
thinking of him; and William Forster, the publisher, made arrangements
with him which resulted in the publication in England of eighty-two
symphonies and twenty-four quartets, not to mention other works. In 1785
he produced one of the most beautiful of his works, _The Seven Words_.
This, I must own, I have never heard in its original form. It was
commissioned by some priests of a church at Cadiz: seven slow movements
to be played between meditations to be spoken on the words of Christ on
the Cross. In this shape it became well known, and, later, Haydn himself
conducted it in London as a _Passione Instrumentale_. The theme inspired
him, and it was a further inspiration to add words and arrange the music
for chorus. Nothing he had composed up to this, whether for church or
theatre or concert, matched it for a strange blend of the pathetic and
the sublime. Had he died in 1790 his name might have lived by this work
alone. In a style as different from Bach's and Handel's as their styles
were different from Palestrina's and Byrde's, he proved himself one of
the mighty brotherhood who knew how to write sacred music. It was first
given with the words at Eisenstadt in 1797, and it is noteworthy that
the last time he directed his own music in public, in 1807, it was _The
Seven Words_, and not _The Creation_ nor _The Seasons_, that was
rendered.

This long chapter of Haydn's life, so uneventful outwardly, was now
about to close. Negotiations had been opened before by Cramer with a
view of inducing him to come to London, but nothing came of them. In
1787 Salomon, an enterprising fiddler, got Bland, a music publisher, to
try what could be done. Bland was unsuccessful, but he got a quartet
from Haydn in this wise. Contrary to his custom of receiving no one
until he was completely dressed, wig and all, in the ceremonious
eighteenth-century fashion, Haydn was trying to shave when Bland was