And that reminds me. As I sat at the Hammersmith Lyric listening to the dialogue between Peachum and Mrs. Peachum on the question whether Polly was Macheath’s wife or his mistress, the thing seemed strangely modern, and not only modern, but Gilbertian. (I am speaking, of course, of the tone, not of the sentiment—Gilbert was a very Victorian of propriety.) Peachum is Gilbertian. “Do you think your mother and I should have liv’d comfortably so long together if ever we had been married? Baggage!” Mrs. Peachum is Gilbertian. “If you must be married, could you introduce nobody into our family but a highwayman? Why, thou foolish jade, thou wilt be as ill-used and as much neglected as if thou hadst married a lord!” Again, “If she had only an intrigue with the fellow, why the very best families have excus’d and huddled up a frailty of that sort. ’Tis marriage, husband, that makes it a blemish.” Once more. “Love him! Worse and worse! I thought the girl had been better bred.” Polly herself is Gilbertian. “Methinks I see him already in the cart, sweeter and more lovely than the nosegay in his hand! I hear the crowd extolling his resolution and intrepidity! What volleys of sighs are sent from the windows of Holborn, that so comely a youth should be brought to disgrace! I see him at the tree! The whole circle are in tears! Even butchers weep!” Lucy is Gilbertian. When Macheath is at the “tree,” her comment is, “There is nothing moves one so much as a great man in distress.” And not only the tone, but the very principle of the play is Gilbertian. Gilbert took some typical figure of the social hierarchy—a Lord Chancellor, a First Lord of the Admiralty—and set the Chancellor capering and the First Lord singing about the handle of the big front door. He put a familiar figure in unfamiliar postures. Gay took a typical figure of his own time—the highwayman—and showed him, not at work on the highway, but enjoying an elegant leisure, behaving like a Chesterfield or one of Congreve’s fine gentlemen. It was the realism, the actuality of the subject, combined with the burlesque of the treatment, that delighted the London of 1728 as it delighted the London of a century and a half later. At each date it was a new experiment in opera libretto. Boswell specified the attraction of Gay’s realism—“the real pictures of London life.” Johnson singles out the “novelty” of the treatment.