In 1792 Sheridan’s affairs began to get entangled. The surveyors reported the theatre unsafe and incapable of repair, and it was therefore resolved to build a new one at a cost of £150,000 by means of 300 shares at £500 each. In the meantime, while Sheridan was paying interest for his loan, the company was playing at an enormous expense on borrowed stages; and the careless and profuse manager, his prudent wife now dead, was maintaining three establishments--one at Wanstead, one at Isleworth, and one in Jermyn Street. In 1794 a new Theatre was built by Henry Holland. In 1798 that masterpiece of false, hysterical German sentiment, “The Stranger” (translated from Kotzebue), was rewritten by Sheridan, and brought out at his own theatre. This was one of the earliest importations of the Germanism that Canning afterwards, for political purposes, so pungently denounced in the _Anti-Jacobin_. The great success of “The Stranger,” and the false taste it had implanted, induced Sheridan, in 1799, to bring out the play of “Pizarro.” He wrote scarcely anything in it but the speech of Rolla, which is itself an amplification of a few lines of the original. The new theatre was to have cost £75,000, and the £150,000 subscribed for was to have paid the architect and defrayed the mortgage debts. The theatre, however, cost more than £150,000; only part of the debt was paid off, and a claim of £70,000 remained upon the property.[595] On the 24th of February 1809, while the House of Commons was occupied with Mr. Ponsonby’s motion on the conduct of the war in Spain, the debate was interrupted by a great glare of light through the windows. When the cause was ascertained, so much sympathy was felt for Sheridan that it was proposed to adjourn; but Sheridan calmly rose and said, “that whatever might be the extent of his private calamity, he hoped it would not interfere with the public business of the country.” He then left the house, and is said to have reached Drury Lane just in time to find all hope of saving his property abandoned. According to one story he coolly proceeded to the Piazza Coffee-house and discussed a bottle of wine, replying to a friend who praised his philosophic calmness, “Why, a man may surely be allowed to take a glass of wine _at his own fireside_.”[596] He is said to have been most grieved at the loss of a harpsichord that had belonged to his wife. Encouraged by the opening presented, and at the tardiness of shareholders to rebuild, speculators now proposed to erect a third theatre; but this design Sheridan and his friends defeated, and Mr. Whitbread, the great brewer of Chiswell Street, Finsbury, who afterwards destroyed himself, exerted his energies in the rebuilding of it.