Audience.

C.



[Footnote 1: Dryden's play of 'Sir Martin Mar-all' was produced in 1666.
It was entered at Stationers' Hall as by the duke of Newcastle, but
Dryden finished it. In Act 5 the foolish Sir Martin appears at a window
with a lute, as if playing and singing to Millicent, his mistress, while
his man Warner plays and sings. Absorbed in looking at the lady, Sir
Martin foolishly goes on opening and shutting his mouth and fumbling on
the lute after the man's song, a version of Voiture's 'L'Amour sous sa
Loi', is done. To which Millicent says,

'A pretty-humoured song--but stay, methinks he plays and sings still,
and yet we cannot hear him--Play louder, Sir Martin, that we may have
the Fruits on't.']


[Footnote 2: Handel had been met in Hanover by English noblemen who
invited him to England, and their invitation was accepted by permission
of the elector, afterwards George I., to whom he was then Chapel-master.
Immediately upon Handel's arrival in England, in 1710, Aaron Hill, who
was directing the Haymarket Theatre, bespoke of him an opera, the
subject being of Hill's own devising and sketching, on the story of
Rinaldo and Armida in Tasso's 'Jerusalem Delivered'. G. Rossi wrote the
Italian words. 'Rinaldo', brought out in 1711, on the 24th of February,
had a run of fifteen nights, and is accounted one of the best of the 35
operas composed by Handel for the English stage. Two airs in it, 'Cara