It does not seem a very exacting ideal, but the poor poet missed it.  Whether Mrs. Farquhar loved a fiddle as her life is not recorded, but she certainly was not free from all sordid ends and unworthy tricks.  The little lady in the mourning mantua soon fell in love with our gallant spark, and when he made court to her, she represented herself as very wealthy.  The deed accomplished, Mrs. Farquhar turned out to be penniless; and the poet, like a gentleman as he was, never reproached her, but sat down cheerfully to a double poverty.  In Love and Business the story does not proceed so far.  He receives Miss Penelope V——­’s timid advances, describes himself to her, is soon as much in love with his little lady as she with him, and is making broad demands and rich-blooded confidences in fine style, no offence taken where no harm is meant.  In one of the letters to Penelope we get a very interesting glance at a famous, and, as it happens, rather obscure, event—­the funeral of the great Dryden, in May 1700.  Farquhar says: 

“I come now from Mr. Dryden’s Funeral, where we had an Ode in Horace sung, instead of David’s Psalms; whence you may find that we don’t think a Poet worth Christian Burial; the Pomp of the Ceremony was a kind of Rhapsody, and fitter, I think, for Hudibras than him; because the Cavalcade was mostly Burlesque; but he was an extraordinary Man, and bury’d after an extraordinary Fashion; for I believe there was never such another Burial seen; the Oration indeed was great and ingenious, worthy the Subject, and like the Author [Dr. Garth], whose Prescriptions can restore the Living, and his Pen embalm the Dead.  And so much for Mr. Dryden, whose Burial was the same with his Life,—­Variety, and not of a Piece.  The Quality and Mob, Farce and Heroicks, the Sublime and Ridicule mixt in a Piece, great Cleopatra in a Hackney Coach.”

WHAT ANN LANG READ

Who was Ann Lang?  Alas!  I am not sure; but she flourished one hundred and sixty years ago, under his glorious Majesty, George I., and I have become the happy possessor of a portion of her library.  It consists of a number of cheap novels, all published in 1723 and 1724, when Ann Lang probably bought them; and each carries, written on the back of the title, “ann Lang book 1727,” which is doubtless the date of her lending them to some younger female friend.  The letters of this inscription are round and laboriously shaped, while the form is always the same, and never “Ann Lang, her book,” which is what one would expect.  It is not the hand of a person of quality:  I venture to conclude that she who wrote it was a milliner’s apprentice or a servant-girl.  There are five novels in this little collection, and a play, and a pamphlet of poems, and a bundle of love-letters, all signed upon their title-pages by the Ouida of the period, the great Eliza Haywood.