was evidently intended for a wider sphere and a more
progressive age than those he had to adorn. But despite all his
financial talents some of the best players in Drury Lane were ready to
desert from that house the moment the chance came.

[Illustration: WILLIAM CONGREVE

By Sir GODFREY KNELLER, 1709]

The chance did come, in the season of 1706-7, when Mrs. Oldfield,
Wilks, Mrs. Rogers, and several others, went over to the handsome new
theatre in the Haymarket, and were joined there later by Cibber.
This imposing house was opened in the spring of 1705 by Congreve and
Vanbrugh, and to it had gone Betterton and his associates at Lincoln's
Inn Fields. But noble old Roscius, who had so long cast his welcome
spell upon London theatre-goers, was getting old and feeble, and so
were several of the other members; the spell was well-nigh broken, and
not even a trial of that "new-fangled" style of entertainment, Italian
opera,[A] could make the management a success.

[Footnote A: How Italian opera was despised by certain critics
of Queen Anne's reign has already been shown in "Echoes of the
Playhouse." In his "Essay on the Operas after the Italian Manners,"
Dennis writes (1706): "If that is truly the most Gothic, which is the
most oppos'd to Antick, nothing can be more Gothick than an Opera,
since nothing can be more oppos'd to the ancient Tragedy, than the
modern Tragedy in Musick, because the one is reasonable, the other
ridiculous; the one is artful, the other absurd; the one beneficial,
the other pernicious; in short, the one natural and the other
monstrous."]

Now enters upon the scene the redoubtable Owen Swiney, who plays a
short but brilliant part in the theatrical world, and next, with all
his money gone, enters upon a twenty years' exile on the Continent.
Then he will come home, to be made Keeper of the King's Mews,
and presently our Colley will immortalise him in one of those
pen-portraits which make so many of the Poet Laureate's friends or
foes stand out clear and distinct against the background of the
"Apology." Here is the picture, fresh and beaming as ever:

* * * * *

"If I should farther say, that this person has been well known in
almost every metropolis in Europe; that few private men, with so
little reproach, run through more various turns of fortune; that, on
the wrongside of three-score,[A] he has yet the open spirit of a hale
young fellow of five and twenty; that thou