Even in after years Colley grew bitter in thinking of the “Fair Quaker,” and could not help indulging in a dig at its expense when he came to write the “Apology.”  He likewise paid his satirical compliments to the new-fangled Italian opera which was given at the Haymarket during the season of 1709-10, on the days when the regular dramatic company did not appear.  The opera had already proved a drawing attraction, but at the time here mentioned the popular interest in the performances had fallen off, and the dear and ever fickle public, of high and low degree, prefered either Drury Lane or the trial of Sacheverel to the artistic delights of music and the drama at the rival house.  And so Cibber plaintively sighs.

“The truth is, that this kind of entertainment [opera] being so entirely sensual, it had no possibility of getting the better of our reason but by its novelty; and that novelty could never be supported but by an annual change of the best voices, which, like the finest flowers, bloom but for a season, and when that is over are only dead nosegays.  From this natural cause we have seen within these two years even Farinelli singing to an audience of five and thirty pounds, and yet, if common fame may be credited, the same voice, so neglected in one country, has in another had charms sufficient to make that crown sit easy on the head of a Monarch, which the jealousy of politicians (who had their views in his keeping it) fear’d, without some such extraordinary amusement, his Satiety of Empire might tempt him a second time to resign."[A]

[Footnote A:  The monarch alluded to was evidently Victor Amadeus, King of Sardinia.  The tenor Farinelli (whose real name was Carlo Broschi) was born in the dukedom of Modena in 1705, and died 1782.]

That Cibber knew something of the wrangles which inevitably follow in the wake of an operatic troupe may be seen from the next paragraph: 

“There is, too, in the very species of an Italian singer such an innate, fantastical pride and caprice, that the government of them (here at least) is almost impracticable.  This distemper, as we were not sufficiently warn’d or apprized of, threw our musical affairs into perplexities we knew not easily how to get out of.  There is scarce a sensible auditor in the Kingdom that has not since that time had occasion to laugh at the several instances of it.  But what is still more ridiculous, these costly canary birds have sometimes infested the whole body of our dignified lovers of musick with the same childish animosities.”

It was merely an illustration of the melancholy fact that the heavenly maid of music is too often attended by the handmaiden of discord.  But to continue: