" To use language
less poetical, a wealthy tradesman--a cheesemonger, I think--found the
capital to build up a new theatre. The second edifice was elegant, and
almost splendid; but in the commencement it seemed fated to undergo as
evil fortune as its precursor. I cannot exactly remember whether it was
in the old or the new Olympic--but I think it was in the new one--that
the notorious Walter Watts ran a brief and sumptuous career as manager.
He produced many pieces, some of them his own, in a most luxurious
manner. He was a man about town, a _viveur_, a dandy; and it turned out
one morning that Walter Watts had been, all along, a clerk in the Globe
Insurance Office, at a salary of a hundred and fifty pounds a year; and
that he had swindled his employers out of enormous sums of money. He was
tried, nominally for stealing "a piece of paper, value one penny," being
a check which he had abstracted; but it was understood that his
defalcations were little short of ninety thousand pounds sterling. Watts
was convicted, and sentenced to ten years' transportation. The poor
wretch was not of the heroically villanous mould in which the dashing
criminals who came after him, Robson and Redpath, were cast. He was
troubled with a conscience. He had drunk himself into delirium tremens;
and starting from his pallet one night in a remorseful frenzy, he hanged
himself in the jail.
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