During the fifty years preceding Handel's half-century in London, Italian music gradually eclipsed the French, which had enjoyed much favour after Charles II returned from France in 1660. Purcell had abetted this change in taste, for he had ‘faithfully endeavour'd a just imitation of the most fam'd Italian Masters; principally, to bring the seriousness and gravity of that sort of Musick into vogue, and reputation among our Country-men, whose humor, 'tis time now, should begin to loath the levity, and balladry of our neighbours’. Italian music had overwhelmed the English as well as the French by 1714, when John Macky noted that the decade-old theatre ‘for Opera's at the End of the Pall-Mall, or Hay-Market, is the finest I ever saw, and where we are entertained in Italian Musick generally twice a Week … The English affect more the Italian than the French Musick; and their own Compositions are between the Gravity of the first, and the Levity of the other … They have now a good many very Eminent Masters; but the Taste of the Town being at this Day all Italian, it is a great discouragement to them’. This was true for instrumental as well as vocal genres. When reflecting upon the ‘circumstances which concurred to convert the English Musick intirely over from the French to the Italian taste’, Roger North (c. 1650–1734) found the decisive step to be the arrival of Corelli's sonatas and concertos, which ‘cleared the ground of all other sorts of musick whatsoever’ and ‘are to the musitians like the bread of life’.