It was during Gay’s stay at Hampstead that he wrote his tragedy of ‘The Captive,’ which he was requested to read to the Princess of Wales at Leicester House. On that occasion, when the hour came, and he saw the Princess and her ladies in expectation, advancing ‘with reverence too great for any other attention, and pre-resolved to impress Her Royal Highness as favourably towards the poet as the poem, he quite lost sight of a footstool in the way, and, stumbling over it, fell against a large screen, which he overset, and thus made his obeisance in a style that threw the ladies into no small disorder, and himself into such a state that but for the good-nature of his royal auditor must have told severely against the effect of the tragedy,’[243] which was brought out at Drury Lane, and played on the third night by particular desire of the Princess of Wales.[244] Think of the good-natured merriment with which Arbuthnot, ‘who was seldom serious but when attacking some great enormity,’ received the account of his fat friend’s sudden projection into the royal circle; how Swift must have chuckled over the comicality, Pope and the rest of the witty brotherhood joining in a loud laugh that none would enjoy more heartily than the genial-tempered subject of it. In 1723 I find Mrs. Pendarves writing to Swift that ‘the beautiful Irish girl, Miss Kelly’ (the _Syren_ of this lady’s letters to her sister) ‘is at Hampstead, quite alone, and she deserves it. She is in a very expensive way, with her sickness, her servants, and her horses, high passions, low spirits, and a tyrannous father.’ Not a very pleasing picture of the wilful Irish beauty who paid Hampstead the compliment to prefer it to more fashionable places. Yet the fair widow had previously written of Miss Kelly as ‘very harmless, and not at all _coquet_; she brings in all the news that flies about, and now and then adds a little of her own.’ This is the lady about whom Lady Betty Germain eight years later writes to Swift, observing: ‘Miss Kelly was a very pretty girl when she went from hence, and the beaux show their good taste by liking her. I hear her father is now kind to her, but if she is not mightily altered, she would give up some of her airs and equipage to live in England.’ In a letter of a later date, to the Dean, Lady Betty says: ‘Surely your Irish air is very bad for darts, if Miss Kelly’s are blunted already. Make her cross father let her come here, and we won’t use her so in England.’ Once more, May 1, 1733, Lady Betty, still writing to Swift, says: ‘I am extremely Miss Kelly’s humble servant, but I will never believe she is more valued for her beauty and good qualities in Ireland than she was in England.’ Then comes a bit of ill news concerning the Hibernian beauty: