Some say compared to Bononcini
That Mynheer Handel’s but a ninny.
Others aver that he to Handel
Is scarcely fit to hold a candle;
Strange all this difference should be
’Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee.
Its publication created quite a sensation in the literary world; the wits of the day attributed it to Swift, and he has been often credited with it in later times. Handel’s biographer, M. Victor Schoelcher, thus refers to it—“Swift, who admired nothing, and who had no ear, wrote an epigram upon the subject,” and adds, “the angry injustice of the nobles” who were in league against the great composer was “far preferable to the empty eclecticism of the Dean of St Patrick’s.” The question of authorship is, however, easily disposed of by a reference to Byrom’s journal, in which, writing under date, Saturday, June 5, 1725, he says:—
“We went to see Mr. Hooper, who was at dinner at Mr. Whitworth’s; he came over to us to Mill’s Coffee House, told us of my epigram upon Handel and Bononcini being in the papers.... Bob came to supper; said that Glover had showed him the verses in the Journal, not knowing that they were mine.”
And so the years went round. The summer months he usually spent with his family and kindred in Lancashire; looking in now and then at the “College;” discussing learnedly with Dr. Deacon, Clayton, Thyer, and other of the local literati; paying court to Lady Bland; spending the day with “Mother Byrom” at Kersall; dining with “brother Byrom at the Cross” (Edward Byrom’s, in the Market Place); “drinking a dish of tea with sister Brearcliffe” at her stately house in Spring Gardens; or taking an evening walk “after sermon by the river side by Strangeways with Mr. Leycester and Dr. Mainwaring;” for Strangeways Walk, as it was called, was then a pleasant tree-shaded lane, with the pleasaunce belonging to Hunt’s Bank Hall, the residence of Mr. Clowes, and the stately woods of Strangeways Park on the one hand, and verdant meadows and pastures reaching down to the banks of the pure and sparkling Irwell on the other. In London his time was pretty well occupied with his pupils, the brief intervals of leisure being spent in social intercourse with his Lancashire and Cambridge friends, writing epigrams, disputing on religious doctrines, attending meetings at the (Royal) “Society,” “making merry at the Mitre,” and lamenting the shortcomings of his laundress.