"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 £700, 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 Peachum, having settled £400 a year on her during pleasure, and upon disagreement £200 a year."[25] She had played in the whole sixty-three performances of the Opera, the forty-seventh performance being set aside for her benefit. The sixty-third performance took place on June 19th, and that was her last appearance on the boards of a theatre. In 1751, shortly after the death of his wife, the Duke married her, she being then about forty-three, and he sixty-six.[26] [Footnote 1: Swift: _Work_ (ed. Scott), XVII, p. 157.] [Footnote 2: _Ibid_., XVII, p. 162.] [Footnote 3: _See_ p. 41 of this work.] [Footnote 4: Spence: _Anecdotes_ (ed. Singer), p. 159.] [Footnote 5: Pope: _Works_ (ed. Elwin and Courthope), VII, p. 111.] [Footnote 6: Boswell: _Life of Johnson_ (ed. Hill), II, p. 368.] [Footnote 7: Spence: _Anecdotes_, p. 159.] [Footnote 8: Dr. Herring: _Sermons_ (1763), p. 5.] [Footnote 9: _Annual Register_ (1773), I, p. 132.] [Footnote 10: Genest: _History of the Stage_, III, p. 223.] [Footnote 11: _History of Music_, V, p. 317.] [Footnote 12: _Lives of the Poets_ (ed. Hill), III, p. 278.]