Dublin, March 28th, 1728.

“We have your opera for sixpence, and we are as full of it pro modulo nostro as London can be; continually acting, and house crammed, and the Lord-Lieutenant several times there, laughing his heart out.  I wish you had sent me a copy, as I desired to oblige an honest bookseller.  It would have done Motte no harm, for no English copy has been sold, but the Dublin one has run prodigiously.

“I did not understand that the scene of Lockit and Peachum’s quarrel was an imitation of one between Brutus and Cassius, till I was told it.

“I wish Macheath, when he was going to be hanged, had imitated Alexander the Great, when he was dying.  I would have had his fellow-rogues desire his commands about a successor, and he to answer, ‘Let it be the most worthy,’ etc.

“We hear a million of stories about the Opera, of the encore at the song, ‘That was levell’d at me,’ when two great ministers were in a box together, and all the world staring at them.

“I am heartily glad your Opera has mended your purse, though perhaps it may spoil your Court.

“I think that rich rogue, Rich, should in conscience make you a present of two or three hundred guineas.  I am impatient that such a dog, by sitting still, should get five times more than the author.

“You told me a month ago of L700, and have you not yet made up the eighth?  I know not your methods.  How many third days are you allowed, and how much is each day worth, and what did you get for copy?

“Will you desire my Lord Bolingbroke, Mr. Pulteney, and Mr. Pope, to command you to buy an annuity with two thousand pounds? that you may laugh at Courts, and bid Ministers ’hiss, etc.’—­and ten to one they will be ready to grease you when you are fat.

“I hope your new Duchess will treat you at the Bath, and that you will be too wise to lose your money at play.

“Get me likewise Polly’s mezzotinto.

“Lord, how the schoolboys at Westminster and university lads adore you at this juncture!  Have you made as many men laugh as ministers can make weep.”

* * * * *

Colley Cibber, in his “Apology” said that “Gay had more skilfully gratified the public taste than all the brightest authors that ever wrote before him,” and although this was undoubtedly a piece of friendly exaggeration, it is a fact that John Gay was now a personage.  “Mr. Gay’s fame continues; but his riches are in a fair way of diminishing; he is gone to the Bath,” Martha Blount wrote to Swift, May 7th;[23] and two months later, with great pride, Gay told Swift, “My portrait mezzotinto is published from Mrs. Howard’s painting."[24] Indirectly, he secured further notoriety when, in the summer, Lavinia Fenton, who had played the heroine in the Opera, ran away with a Duke.  “The Duke of Bolton, I hear,” he wrote to Swift from Bath, “has run away with Polly