His financial worries at an end for a while, he completed Serse and produced it at the King's Theatre on 15th April. It was the second of the two operas for which Heidegger had offered him £1000. Serse is one of the big mysteries in Handel's life. No one knows where he obtained the libretto, or why he should suddenly adopt broad farce and expect to make a success of it. He may have had it in his mind to cut into the success of The Beggar's Opera, but Serse was about the last work that would do it. He could certainly have been in no mood for farce after the anxieties on the grounds of health and finance, through which he had passed, and from which he had not as yet escaped. In spite of all the incongruity of Serse, it produced the air which, through the two centuries that have since nearly elapsed, has been better known to the public at large, and more frequently played, than anything Handel ever composed-an air about the shadow of a plane-tree, and better known as the famous "Largo." Out of this absurdity, Serse, which had no raison d'être, no beginning and no end, Handel in a mood conjured a piece of melody which, now, as then, holds a theatre audience when it is played, and remains one of the master melodies of the world. Not that Serse could stand on a single air. Before the season had ended the King's Theatre had closed down, and Heidegger had decided that, for the time at any rate, Handel was an expensive form of speculation.

But one man, at least, had made a lot of money out of Handel whilst the theatres had been losing on him. This was Jonathan Tyers, who ran Vauxhall Gardens as an evening pleasure haunt for the better classes of Society. Tyers was a queer mixture of artistic inclination and hard commercialism. He had opened the Gardens six years before on a stretch of ground he leased from Elizabeth Masters at the cheap rental of £250 a year. It had been a great opening. The Prince of Wales had been present, with a guard of one hundred soldiers with fixed bayonets. Tyers arranged all possible demonstration for the pomp-loving Frederick, and the hundred bayonets was the finishing touch, for only four hundred persons paid for admission! Frederick, with his little army, was disgusted; all this would make him appear a coward to a handful of people.

Vauxhall Gardens

If something had occurred to provide an excuse for the use of this armed might, things would not have been so bad. The ceremony lasted from nine o'clock in the evening until four o'clock in the morning, and the only unexpected incident was that a drunken waiter put on a masquerading dress, and a pickpocket stole fifty guineas from a visitor, and was caught red-handed.1

In spite of the fiasco of the opening, the Prince remained a constant visitor to Vauxhall Gardens till his death. Its open immoralities appealed to him. One bought a silver season ticket, a beautiful trifle designed by Hogarth, or paid a guinea to mingle with the select for the evening. Tyers ran the Gardens to pay, and he made them pay by appealing to the passions on the one hand, and the artistic senses on the other. Vauxhall Gardens after dark held the cream of the night life of London. Everybody went there. They dined there, they met the ladies of the town, and they listened to Handel-music, played by the finest orchestras obtainable, whilst they supped. For Tyers had always run Handel on his bands. He may have had no sense of music, he may have had Handel played just because people were in the habit of going to hear his music. Whatever was at the back of his mind, he stuck to Handel.

Vauxhall Gardens soon came into high favour. One went there usually by boat, and at Westminster and Whitehall Stairs barges and boats were always in waiting during the evening for the hire of intending visitors. Despite the loose morals of the place, bishops visited it, and somehow managed to retain their characters. City men took their families, attended by a footman carrying provisions. The scene at the landing-stage was unlike any other in London, for, although Tyers had beadles placed there to keep order, the commotion was beyond description. All the boats were mixed up in hopeless confusion, there was a mob of people in wonderful dresses shouting and swearing and quarrelling, and a parcel of ugly fellows running out into the water to pull one violently ashore. Then the crowd streamed through a dark passage into the glaring splendour of a thousand lamps."

1 Warwick Wroth, "The London Pleasure Gardens," p. 286 et seq.

2 Ibid.

Tyers, canny fellow, looked after his patrons well. The food was of the best; the wines-there were no wines in London like those that figured on Tyers' carte. And the prices, as the food and the wine, were extremely select. In consequence, a great many brought their own food. Not that this bothered Tyers. The people with money to burn gave him all the profits he wanted.

Then he pandered to the Prince and opened a rotunda, which he named after him, and the Prince, with his mob of night-fellows, repaid him for the compliment. The decorations were wonderful, and Hogarth allowed some of his pictures to be copied for this purpose. There were cunning little boxes, artistically decorated, where one supped in sinister secret, to the daintiness of a Handel minuet, played with perfect understanding. One danced to a number from Alcina. There was an absorbing operatic dreaminess in an excerpt from Acis and Galatea, whilst the cool winds came flooding into the boxes, fresh with the scent of the massed flowers in the flower-beds which the army of gardeners employed by Tyers had planted. Rich merchants went there after the turmoil and heat of the town. The quality forsook their heavy tables and port decanters for the soothe, the intimacy of Vauxhall Gardens, its strings of lights, its half-hidden boxes with some crazy swinging lantern throwing splashes of light and shadow into them, its delicate dinners, and the glamour which thinly-veiled sin brings to an indolent life. One ate and drank, one gambled and danced, and met people, and met other people, and Tyers was a good fellow. It was all very wonderful.

season.

Originally Tyers issued a thousand guinea tickets for the Later on he raised the price to 25s., and ultimately to two guineas. Certain patrons, like Hogarth and Handel, had special tickets of their own; most of them with Hogarth's elegant design engraved on silver. Handel's ticket showed an Arion riding on a Dolphin. Dolphin. Hogarth, however, went one better, and had a ticket that had been struck in gold, and which bore the words "Hogarth. In perpetuam Beneficii Memoriam." This may have been a special gift from Tyers in

1 Warwick Wroth, "The London Pleasure Gardens."