Handel at one time became the manager of the Opera House at the Haymarket,--one can imagine it with its hundreds of wax candles, its powder, patches, and orange girls--this undertaking the Princess Royal aided by every means in her power, inducing the King and Queen to not only subscribe to a box, but to frequently visit the theatre. This must have been an infliction upon King George, whose dislike for “bainting and boetry,” together with the other arts is proverbial. It cannot be denied that Frederick, Prince of Wales, had the attribute of combativeness, and a natural power of enraging others by his mode of opposition. No sooner had his sister’s _protégé_ established his opera at the Haymarket theatre than he forthwith started an opposition opera at the theatre in Lincolns Inn Fields, possibly not very far from the present Gaiety. Then commenced a state of affairs which can only be regarded as extremely comical. All the adherents of the Prince--and he was very popular among the nobility as well as the people--ceased their patronage of Handel’s theatre, and transferred it to the Prince’s undertaking in Lincolns Inn Fields. Excitement between the two parties was high at the time, and the Prince’s theatre was crowded. Lord Chesterfield, who by this time was becoming a strong partisan of Frederick’s, wittily commented on the state of affairs one evening at the Lincolns Inn Fields establishment. He had, he informed the Prince, just looked in at the Haymarket theatre on his way down, and found nobody there but the King and Queen, “and as I thought they might be talking business,” he concluded, airily, “I came away.” Much as this joke pleased the Prince it cannot be expected that its repetition gave much satisfaction to the King and Queen, and the Princess Royal, the latter of whom spoke bitterly of the whole affair. She commented with a sneer that “she expected in a little while to see half the House of Lords playing in the orchestra at the Prince’s Theatre in their robes and coronets,” which was a remark truly worthy of a spiteful young lady, and the anger of the King, her father, can be understood when it is considered that he had been dragged to witness a performance he did not care a bit about, to be snubbed by his nobility and made a public spectacle of. The King’s appreciation of a theatrical performance was not of a very high order; of an opera it was probably much worse. The following anecdote is related of one of his visits to a theatre when the play was Richard the Third, and Garrick sustained the title rôle. Notwithstanding the talent of the great actor, King George’s fancy was captured by the man who played the part of Lord Mayor. During the remainder of the performance the little monarch continually worried his attendants with the following questions: “Will not that lor-mayor come again? I like dat lor-mayor. When will he come again?”