Beside, the girl was the rage. Verses were made on her, and not one but lauded her grace, her starry eyes, her voice angelic, and the Lord knows what! Pamphlets were writ of her life with scarce a grain of truth to the bushel. Fine ladies wore a head-dress surnamed the Polly head,—a little cap of Quakerish demureness with a straw hat atop,—but they loaded it with flowers and ribbons and so spoilt its simplicity. Her figure, appealing, gentle, with claspt hands praying to her Macheath, the violent Lucy t’other side of him, took the town with a kind of emotion as yet untasted, the women as well as the men. They too would pet the pretty creature and give her her heart’s desire for the sake of those sweet virginal looks blooming like a flower in the Newgate filth and obscenity. They laughed with her but never at her. The music was sung everywhere and the trills and quirks of the Italian Opera utterly forgot in favour of the fine old English tunes, “Lumps of Pudding,”—“What gudgeons are we men,”—“London Ladies,” and so forth, which bespangle “The Beggar’s Opera,” to Mr. Gay’s fine new words. ’Tis a strange truth but the piece made a kind of artlessness the fashion, doubtless aided by Polly’s kind simple looks, and for awhile—awhile only, ladies tried to drop the modish jargon that Mr. Congreve and Captain Farquhar had made fashionable in their wicked comedies and to look up innocently and protest a taste in primroses, syllabubs and other country delights. ’Tis hard to unravel, but so ’twas. Indeed Mr. Pope himself composed a madrigal— “My Polly as a primrose fair,” set to the air of “Haycock of June,” and had Dr. Swift not laughed him out of countenance it had been gave to the town. The playhouse was beset by fine gentlemen shouldering for a word with the beauty, and Mr. Rich, divided between fear of offending them and terror of losing his Polly, became a perfect Cerberus, and would bark furiously when so much as a harmless haberdasher left a posy for the goddess. ’Twas remarkable how this gentleman, known for his own easy living and morals, might, so far as Diana knew, have been a bishop for the austere regard in which he held her personally and the manner in which from the first he softened his somewhat gross tongue to her ear. She had a grateful regard for him in return, and ’twas not a negligible element in her triumph that she knew it so valuable to him. It chanced that, standing at the wings during a performance, he noted the scene where Lucy Lockit in her jealous rage (which Mrs. Bishop played to the life, he thought) presses upon Polly a glass of poisoned wine. Polly, on the alert, drinks not from it but drops it as hastily as she may. Revolving the by-play, Rich, when the house was cleared and he chatting with the ladies, recalled it.