Farquhar’s widow, who had loved him, appears to have loved his memory.[43] She did not survive her husband many years; for there is reason to suppose she died before 1719, and in penury. Poor Farquhar used to declare that the dread that his family might suffer want was far more bitter to him than death. Wilkes gave at his theatre, in the May of 1708, a benefit for Margaret Farquhar, and twelve years later he was acting as trustee for the young girls Mary and Anne Margaret, whose pension is said by the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ to have amounted to thirty pounds; it was obtained through the exertions of Edmund Challoner, to whom their father had dedicated his _Miscellanies_. Wilkes seems to have again aided both the orphans when they came of age. One of them married an humble tradesman, and died early; the other was living in 1764, wholly uneducated, and, as it is said on small authority, as a maid-servant. Farquhar’s elder biographers and editors, Ware, Genest, Chetwood, and the rest, writing in this daughter’s lifetime, were apparently unconscious of her existence; but the thought of her father’s child, old, neglected, and in a menial position, served to anger Leigh Hunt as late as 1842. Fear and forecast of what is only too likely to befall the helpless, depressed Farquhar in the April long ago, when he lay dying of consumption, and when, with a fortitude which sustained him under his bitter disappointment, for six weeks, he wrote and finished his masterly comedy _The Beaux’ Stratagem_. As he drew near the end of the second act he was told to give up hope; but the second act closes with the famous rattling catechism between Cherry and Archer, and the best bit of verse its author ever made; and the third starts in with the hearty sweet laugh—Anne Oldfield’s laugh—of that “exquisite creature, Mrs. Sullen.” On a fund of grief, Farquhar enriched his London with a legacy of perpetual merriment. The unflagging impetus of his dramas, above and beyond their very real intrinsic merit, accounts for their great and yet unforfeited popularity. They descend to us associated with the intellectual triumphs of the most dear and dazzling names upon the English stage; they move upon the wings of intelligence and good-nature; they “give delight, and hurt not.” They swarm with soldiers, welcome figures long tacitly prohibited from the boards, as too painful a reminder of the Civil Wars. They begin with the clatter of spurs, the bang of doors, the hubbub of bantering voices in “a broadside of damme’s.” Sergeant Kite appears, followed by a mob on whom he lavishes his wheedling, inspiriting gibble-gabble; Roebuck enters in fantastic colloquy with a beggar; Sir Harry crosses the road, singing, with footmen after him, and Vizard meanwhile indicating him to Standard as “the joy of the playhouse and the life of the park, Sir Harry Wildair, newly come from Paris”; _The Twin Rivals_ opens in a volley of epigrams; the rise of the curtain in _The Beaux’