It is not a cruel answer, The writer's mother, now sixty, was si for four months, and began to e: pect trivial services when she wás well, For a year and half as a don many years ago now, and the story is told that, so great were the profits that some busy official sought to mulct the author for income-tax on the royalties which must have acerned!
The choice, I repeat, is delightful, and the production may serve to remind some of us to drop current writings for a space, and to look up literature which deals with the period during which Gay's opera w written.
One would suggest that they were good times for the poor, or that they were anything but what would be regarded to-day as vulgar times, but all the same one feels that it would be good, for a short space. to be wafted back to those rob: di when life was taken more naturally, when society was freer and easier than now, and the wits and thinkers fore gathered for "feasts reason, and flow of soul."
This age also has its wits and it is supposed that they likewise regather and exchange epigrams and thought-shots, but life moved more slowly in the days of Queen Anne ing Georges, and there fewer gnawing fears of the future than are known to-day We have to thank Thackeray for giving us such excellent word-pictures of the times referred to, and he does this in the happiest manner possible: not by giving learned criticisms of the works of Gay and mty little model which is simply e made up in pete v to go with your costume. his contemporaries—Pope, Steele, Congreve, and so on, but by envisage ing the daily life of the times so that we almost smell the reek of the coffee houses, and the odour of wax tapers. We can follow in fancy our wits in their chairs, or their shilling coaches, and get the true atmosphere of London's then dirty streets, dismal and narrow, and lit only by the flares from the link boys, or the lanterns of the watchmen, vee
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.