_The Beggars’ Opera_ was revived by Messrs. Gatti at Covent Garden in the season 1878-9. On this occasion wrote _Punch_: “The house was literally crammed from floor to ceiling by an audience whose enthusiastic temperature increased in a graduated thermometrical scale, the over-boiling point being reached at the back row of the upper gallery; and this on a night when, in the stalls and boxes, wrappers, furs, mantles, and ulsters were _de rigueur_ on account of the rigour of the cold.... Let those who do not believe in a comic tenor see Sims Reeves as Captain Macheath, and they will discover what magic there is even in a refrain of ‘tol-de-lol, lol-de-rol, loddy,’ when given by a tenor who is not impressed by the absurd traditional notion that he is nothing if not sentimental. His acting of the celebrated song ‘How happy could I be with either’ is full of humour, and his change of manner from ‘tol-de-rol’ in a tender tone, when addressed to the gentle, confiding Polly, to the ‘tol-de-rol’ with a true Cockney chick-a-leary twang when addressed to the vulgar Lucy Lockit, is a clever idea, most artistically carried out; and then his dance up the stage while singing, giving his last note good and true to the end in spite of his unaccustomed exertion, as with a jump he seats himself in a natural devil-may-care style upon the table, was followed by an _encore_ so momentous that even he, the _anti-encorist_, was fain to comply with the enthusiastic demand; so he repeated the two verses, the dance, and the jump with as much freshness and vigour as though he had not already sung six songs--snatches, more or less, it is true--and had got ten more to follow.” As a man, Gay was amiable and winning in manner. He had a foible--indolence. Nevertheless he had saved several thousand pounds at the time of his death, which occurred in the house of the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry, in Burlington Gardens, in December, 1732, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey. And now, having done with the man, we come to his chair. Rather over eighty years after the death of Gay some unpublished poems of his were found in an old arm-chair which had belonged to the poet, and after his death had been retained, with other relics, by the surviving members of his family. The history was fully narrated immediately after the discovery in a little book, called _Gay’s Chair_, along with the life of the poet and a selection of the poems discovered; some were too broad in humour for publication.