There is on record another great feud between the partisans of the two rival singers Cuzzoni and Faustina, which eventually resulted in the former leaving this country, cheered, if she could be, by some lines by Ambrose Phillips, who termed her the “charmer of an idle age,” although the management of the Opera House had not much reason to echo this flattering sentiment. Later, the opera having fallen into some financial difficulties, Handel and Heidegger determined to carry it on on their own responsibility. From this time, 1734, when Handel’s partnership with Heidegger ended, to 1782, the Opera House was the scene of all sorts of entertainments, from Handel’s operas and Mlle. Hemel’s dancing, to the ball given by the Knights of the Bath, in 1779, and the masquerade of thirty years earlier, when George II. appeared in an “old-fashioned English habit” (an excellent disguise), and Miss Chudleigh, with next to nothing on, reminded the scandalised Horace Walpole of Andromeda, rather than the Iphigenia whom she was supposed to represent. Some years after the alterations to the theatre, when it was under the management of Gallini, a disastrous fire occurred there, which practically destroyed it, but phœnix-like, a new building quickly arose on its site, although many people, Walpole among them, thought that it was a useless expenditure, as the days of opera appeared to have departed for ever. The new house was designed by Novosielski, and Lord Buckinghamshire laid the first stone, in April, 1790, it being completed in the following year. Later, Michael Kelly and Storace managed it jointly when Sheridan and Taylor were the lessees. Although principally used either as a theatre or opera house, an innovation was attempted, in 1787, by the introduction of ballets, one of which, entitled “Bacchus and Ariadne,” seems to have been anything but adapted _virginibus puerisque_; and it was a question whether the presentation of it or its withdrawal would cause the greater indignation! The names of Goold, the founder of the Union Club, and Taylor, who was perennially in difficulties, Waters and Ebers, Laporte and Lumley, under the last of whom that great quartette composed of Taglioni, Grisi, Grehn, and Cerito performed; and Smith and Mapleson, are among those who figured at various times as _impresarios_ here; while the singers whose voices once echoed through that vast auditorium were such as Jenny Lind and Sontag, Pasta and Tietjens, Mario and Tamburini.