The first season of the Royal Academy finished in a flourish, aided by the circumstance that the metropolis was in the throes of an orgy of financial speculation. We can read of incredible schemes and “bubbles” with the help of which money was to be lured from private pocket-books. Newman Flower tells of “one for trading in hair, another for the universal supply of funerals in Great Britain, one for a wheel of perpetual motion, one ‘for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is’.” Still another project contemplated “breeding silkworms in Chelsea Park.” By the time things were ready for the opening of the Academy’s second season Lord Burlington imported from Rome the composer Giovanni Battista Bononcini, possibly not dreaming that he was introducing a dangerous rival to Handel. In his little way Bononcini had talent and charm, as well as a conceit out of all proportion to his pleasant gifts. An opera of his was produced at the Academy with Senesino in the cast and enjoyed a good run, while a composite work, called “Muzio Scevola”, with one act by Handel, another by Bononcini and a third by a mediocrity, Filippo Mattei, followed. The results of the increasingly complicated situation were to precipitate a contest that split London’s high society into factions. The cynical John Byrom compressed it into an epigram, part of which has entered the English language: “_Some say, compared to Bononcini,_ _That Mynherr Handel’s but a ninny;_ _Others aver that he to Handel_ _Is scarcely fit to hold a candle._ _Strange, all this difference should be_ _’Twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee._” Be all of which as it may, Handel presently had the mortification of seeing his own new “Floridante” fail while Bononcini’s pretty “Griselda” packed the theatre like nothing since “Radamisto!”