I know it.'"

Gay died in the house of his friends, the Duke and Duchess of
Queensberry, on December 4, 1732. He was buried near the tomb of
Chaucer in Westminster Abbey, and a monument was set up to his memory,
bearing on it Pope's famous epitaph which contains the line, "In wit a
man, simplicity a child." Gay is but little known to the present
generation. Young people or old people do not read his fables any
more--those fables which Rousseau thought worthy of special discussion
in his great treatise on Education. The gallant Captain Macheath
swaggers and sings across the operatic stage no more, nor are tears
shed now for pretty Polly Peachum's troubles. Yet every day some one
quotes from Gay, and does not know what he is quoting from.

Walpole was not magnanimous towards enemies who had still the power to
do him harm. When the enemy could hurt him no longer, Walpole felt
anger no longer; {4} but it was not his humor to spare any man who
stood in his way and resisted him. If he was not magnanimous, at least
he did not affect magnanimity. He did not pretend to regard with
contempt or indifference men whom in his heart he believed to be
formidable opponents. It was a tribute to the capacity of a public man
to be disliked by Walpole; a still higher tribute to be dreaded by him.
One of the men whom the great minister was now beginning to hold in
serious dislike and dread was Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of
Chesterfield. Born in 1694, Chesterfield was still what would be
called in political life a young man; he was not quite forty. He had
led a varied and somewhat eccentric career. His father, a morose man,
had a coldness for him. Young Stanhope, according to his own account,
was an absolute pedant at the university. "When I talked my best I
quoted Horace; when I aimed at being facetious I quoted Martial; and
when I had a mind to be a fine gentleman I talked Ovid. I was
convinced that none but the ancients had common-sense; that the
classics contained everything that was either necessary, useful, or
ornamental to me; . . . and I was not even without thoughts of wearing
the _toga virilis_ of the Romans, instead of the vulgar and illiberal
dress of the moderns." Later he had been a devotee of fashion and the
gambling-table, was a man of fashion, and a gambler still. He had
travelled; had seen and studied life in many countries and cities and
courts; had seen and studied many phases of life. He professed