To record the tremendous success of that _Newgate Pastoral_, the suggestion of the first idea of which lies between Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot, and Gay, does not come within my province. The history of the _Beggar’s Opera_, that made “Rich Gay and Gay Rich,” is too well known to bear repetition. Hogarth, however, has left his mark on the famous operatic score. For Rich, the Covent Garden manager, he painted (1729) a picture of the prison scene in which Lucy and Polly are wrangling over Macheath, of which several replicas in oil, some slightly varied, as well as engravings, were afterwards executed. Portraits of many of the great personages of the day are introduced in open boxes _on_ the stage. Macheath was a portrait of the comedian Walker; and the Polly was the beauteous Lavinia Fenton, the handsome, kindly, true-hearted actress with whom the Duke of Bolton, to the amusement and amazement of the town, fell in love, and fairly ran away. The Duchess of Bolton was then still alive, and lived for many years afterwards; and poor Polly had to suffer some part of the penalty which falls on those with whom dukes elope; but at the duchess’s death, her lord showed that he was not of Mrs. Peachum’s opinion, that “’tis marriage makes the blemish,” and right nobly elevated Polly to the peerage. She lived long and happily with him, survived him, and died late in the last century, very old, and beloved, and honoured for her modesty, charity, and piety. “The lovely young Lavinia once had friends,” writes Thomson in the _Seasons_; but our Lavinia lost not her friends to her dying day. If Tenison, and Atterbury, and Sherlock, had nothing to say against Eleanor Gwyn, let us trust that the severest moralist could find charitable words wherewith to speak of Lavinia, Duchess of Bolton.[5]