different as civilized people from savages"; while Stafford
Smith, writing in 1779, tells that music was then "thought to be
in greater perfection than among even the Italians themselves."
There is a characteristic John Bull complacency about these
statements which is hardly borne out by a study of the lives
of the leading contemporary musicians. Even Mr Henry Davey,
the applauding historian of English music, has to admit the
evanescent character of the larger works which came from
the composers of that "bankrupt century." Not one of these
composers--not even Arne--is a real personality to us like Handel,
or Bach, or Haydn, or Mozart. The great merit of English music
was melody, which seems to have been a common gift, but "the only
strong feeling was patriotic enthusiasm, and the compositions that
survive are almost all short ballads expressing this sentiment
or connected with it by their nautical subjects." When Haydn
arrived, there was, in short, no native composer of real genius,
and our "tardy, apish nation" was ready to welcome with special
cordiality an artist whose gifts were of a higher order.

Salomon

We have spoken of Haydn's visit as a long-meditated project. In
1787 Cramer, the violinist, had offered to engage him on his own
terms for the Professional Concerts; and Gallini, the director of
the King's Theatre in Drury Lane, pressed him to write an opera
for that house. Nothing came of these proposals, mainly because
Haydn was too much attached to his prince to think of leaving
him, even temporarily. But the time arrived and the man with it.
The man was Johann Peter Salomon, a violinist, who, having fallen
out with the directors of the professional concerts, had started