Yes, Mr. Rich 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 though he still chuses to speak what he thinks to his best friends with an undisguised freedom, he is, notwithstanding, acceptable to many persons of the first rank and condition; that any one of them (provided he likes them) may now send him, for their service, to Constantinople at half a day’s warning; that Time has not yet been able to make a visible change in any part of him but the colour of his hair, from a fierce coal-black to that of a milder milk-white:  When I have taken this liberty with him, methinks it cannot be taking a much greater if I at once should tell you that this person was Mr. Owen Swiney.”