him into a world of vanity-ridden singers, and cat-brained, sensual women. They flung against him every contraption that would kill the art in the average soul.

It would have destroyed some men, fresh and excited with the first lilts of the world's appraise. It would have destroyed Handel, but for his secret store of courage.

BOOK II

NOON

CHAPTER IX

THE COMING OF BONONCINI

For

THE first season of the Royal Academy finished in triumph for Handel, and when the curtain came down on Radamisto that June night in 1720 London realised that he had created a new and ardent following for good music in the capital. throughout its run the opera had played to crowded houses. Hundreds of people had been turned away from the boxoffice, and the shareholders in the Academy were cheered with the prospect of immediate dividends.

At this time London was wallowing in financial frenzy. A fortnight before Radamisto finished, the King had given the Royal assent to the South Sea Company Bill for redeeming the country's disordered finance. In his speech to Parliament he acclaimed it as "a good foundation for the payment of national debts." Instantly the shares rushed up to a thousand per cent.1 Minor bubbles sprang up everywhere; endless applications for patents, whereby the exploiters hoped to cadge and catch the public money, were made to Parliament. There was one for trading in hair, another for the universal supply of funerals in Great Britain, one for a wheel of perpetual motion, and one "for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is." a

All the shares in the minor bubbles followed those of the great one, to a hectic chorus of fortune-making. All other businesses stood still. Occasionally the gamblers received a mild shock, when a subscription list was opened in the morning in a room taken for the day, and the exploiters of the wildcat scheme disappeared in the evening with the proceeds. But

1 Handel invested some money in the South Sea Company; a receipt form signed by him for money he received therefrom was recently sold in a London auction-room. 2 Justin M'Carthy, "A History of the Four Georges," vol. i. p. 252.

still the public went on. What it lost to an occasional barefaced scamp it hoped to regain on the enterprises of the more plausible scoundrels. Square pieces of card, with the impression in sealing-wax of the Globe Tavern, conveying to their possessors merely the permission to subscribe some time afterwards to a new sail-cloth company "not yet formed," were actually sold in Exchange Alley under the title of "Globe Permits," for sixty guineas and upwards.1

London had gone mad. Music was for the moment forgotten. The only entertainment the public wanted was the farce The Stock Jobbers; or Humours of Change Alley, to which the mob flocked the doors of every performance. Staid landed gentry in the far solitudes of the country sold out their family heirlooms, and hurled the proceeds into the jobbers' offices; duchesses parted with their jewels at starvation prices for the same purpose. Any project was good enough. Even the company started for the purpose of "breeding silkworms in Chelsea park" had its adherents. Money was made as the shares in these financial swindles flung upwards, only to be poured out again in a welter of extravagance and profligacy.

The profiteer of the period appeared in the park in his carriage mingling with the aristocracy, and a newspaper of the 9th July says satirically: "We are informed that since the late hurly-burly of stock-jobbing, there have appeared in London two hundred new coaches and chariots, besides as many more now on the stocks in the coachmakers' yards; above four thousand embroidered coats; about three thousand gold watches at the side of their and their wives; some few private acts of charity; and about two thousand broken tradesmen." 2

Well may Handel have wondered whether there were room any longer for his art in this Babylon. He did not wait to see, for, with the close of Radamisto he departed to Cannons and began preparations for the production of a masque in six scenes and one act, which he called Haman and Mordecai. 1 Thomas Wright, "England Under the House of Hanover," 1848, vol. i. p. 63.

Ibid., vol. i. p. 65.

* No record exists of the actual date of production, but it was certainly before the new opera season opened in November. The Duke of Chandos is said to have paid Handel £1000 for this masque, but of this, again, there is no record.