Later, the opera having fallen into some financial difficulties, Handel and Heidegger determined to carry it on on their own responsibility. From this time, 1734, when Handel’s partnership with Heidegger ended, to 1782, the Opera House was the scene of all sorts of entertainments, from Handel’s operas and Mlle. Hemel’s dancing, to the ball given by the Knights of the Bath, in 1779, and the masquerade of thirty years earlier, when George II. appeared in an “old-fashioned English habit” (an excellent disguise), and Miss Chudleigh, with next to nothing on, reminded the scandalised Horace Walpole of Andromeda, rather than the Iphigenia whom she was supposed to represent.
Some years after the alterations to the theatre, when it was under the management of Gallini, a disastrous fire occurred there, which practically destroyed it, but phœnix-like, a new building quickly arose on its site, although many people, Walpole among them, thought that it was a useless expenditure, as the days of opera appeared to have departed for ever. The new house was designed by Novosielski, and Lord Buckinghamshire laid the first stone, in April, 1790, it being completed in the following year. Later, Michael Kelly and Storace managed it jointly when Sheridan and Taylor were the lessees.
Although principally used either as a theatre or opera house, an innovation was attempted, in 1787, by the introduction of ballets, one of which, entitled “Bacchus and Ariadne,” seems to have been anything but adapted virginibus puerisque; and it was a question whether the presentation of it or its withdrawal would cause the greater indignation!
The names of Goold, the founder of the Union Club, and Taylor, who was perennially in difficulties, Waters and Ebers, Laporte and Lumley, under the last of whom that great quartette composed of Taglioni, Grisi, Grehn, and Cerito performed; and Smith and Mapleson, are among those who figured at various times as impresarios here; while the singers whose voices once echoed through that vast auditorium were such as Jenny Lind and Sontag, Pasta and Tietjens, Mario and Tamburini.
A second great fire, on December 6th, 1867, again destroyed the building, which was subsequently re-erected with its principal frontage in Pall Mall, at a great cost; this in its turn we have seen disappear, and the new “His Majesty’s Theatre” rise on its site, with its chief entrance in the Haymarket, and a long frontage to Charles Street. Luckily, the old arcade is embodied in the new building, and here are still to be seen those dear little shops that look so clean and prosperous and yet so diminutive—like a sort of Tom Thumbs among business establishments!
At the north corner of Charles Street and Regent Street is the Junior United Service Club, in which, report hath it, that a certain part of the dining-room, frequented by the older members, is known as “Rotten Row”; while across Waterloo Place (or really the continuation of Regent Street) is yet another Club—the Caledonian—housed in the former residence of the late Lord Waterford.
ST. JAMES’S SQUARE.
A few steps further and we are in the heart of St. James’s Square. Here history and legend will run away with us if I do not restrain my pen, for every house has an interesting history; each has been the abode of some famous personage.
Here, in the south-east corner, is the long front of Norfolk House, the residence of the last six Dukes of Norfolk; behind it still stands the old house, used principally as a lumber-room, in which George III., and his brother, the Duke of York, were born, what time the mansion was lent to Frederick, Prince of Wales, by an accommodating Duke. The Bishop of London’s official town residence, whither the Duke of Hamilton, after his celebrated duel with Lord Mohun, was carried, is next door, nestling between the ducal abode and Lord Derby’s iron-balustraded mansion. Commerce has invaded the Square, for, at the opposite corner, is a Bank, and next to it Lord Falmouth’s house, which has some old cannon as posts planted in the pavement before it.
