There was not so much smoke in London in those days--the consumption of coal being much more limited--and the great cross could be seen from Notting Hill, and from the palace windows at Kensington. The Queen never abandoned this royal residence; and from the gravel road by which immediate entrance was made, stretched away the waste hunting ground, afterward converted into the grassy slopes of Hyde Park--stagnant pools and marshy thickets lying in place of what is now the Serpentine. People living at Reading in that day--whence ladies now come in for a morning’s shopping and back to lunch--did then, in seasons of heaviest travelling, put two days to the journey; and joined teams, and joined forces and outriders, to make good security against the highwaymen that infested the great roads leading from that direction into the town. Queen Anne herself was beset and robbed near to Kew shortly before she came to the throne; and along Edgeware Road, where are now long lines of haberdasher shops, and miles of gas-lamps, were gibbets, on which the captured and executed highwaymen were hung up in warning. _John Gay._ Some of these highwaymen were hung up in literature too, and made a figure there; but not, I suspect, in way of warning. It was the witty Dean Swift who suggested to the brisk and frolicsome poet, John Gay, that these gentlemen of the high-road would come well into a pastoral or a comedy; and out of that suggestion came, some years later, “The Beggar’s Opera,” with Captain Macheath for a hero, that took the town by storm--ran for sixty and more successive nights, and put its musical, saucy songlets afloat in all the purlieus of London. It was, indeed, the great forerunner of our ballad operas; much fuller, indeed, of grime and foul strokes than Mr. Gilbert’s contagious sing-song; but possessing very much of his briskness and quaint turns of thought, and of that pretty shimmer of language which lends itself to melody as easily as the thrushes do.