d wants to get it
produced.

The little man's name is David Garrick; the other is Samuel Johnson.

They listen to the singing, and finally Samuel turns to his friend and
says, "I say, Davy, music is nothing but a noise that is less
disagreeable than some others." They would go away, would these two, but
they have paid good money to get in, and so sit it out disgustedly,
watching the audience and the play alternately.

In one of the boxes is a weazened little man, all out of drawing, in a
black velvet doublet, satin breeches and silk stockings. At his side is
a rudimentary sword. The man's face is sallow, and shrewdness and
selfishness are shown in every line. He looks like a baby suddenly grown
old. The two friends in the pit have seen this man before, but they have
never met him face to face, because they do not belong to his set.

"Do you think God is proud of a work like that?" at last asked Davy,
jerking his thumb toward the bad modeling in courtly black.

"God never made him." The big man swayed in his seat, and added, "God
had nothing to do with him--he is the child of Beelzebub."

"Think 'ee so?" asks Davy. "Why, Mephisto has some pretty good traits;
but Alexander Pope is as crooked as an interrogation-point, inside and
out."

"I hear he wears five pairs of stockings to fill out his shanks, and
sole-leather stays to keep him from flattening out like a devilfish,"
said Doctor Johnson.

"But he makes a lot o' money!"

"Well, he has to, for he pays an old woman a hundred guineas a year to
dress and undress him."

"I know, but she writes his heroic couplets, too!"

"Davy, I fear you are getting cynical--let's change the subject."

It surely is a case of artistic jealousy. Our friends locate the poet
Gay, a fat little man, who is with his publisher, Rich.

"They say," says Samuel, again rolling in his seat as if about to have
an apoplectic fit, "they say that Gay has become rich, and Rich has
become gay since they got out that last book." There comes an interlude
in the play, and our friends get up to stretch their legs.

"How now, Dick Savage?" calls Samuel, as he pushes three men over like
ninepins, to seize a shabby fellow whose neckcloth and hair-cut betray
him as being a poet. "How now, Dick, you said that Italian music was
damnably bad! Why do you come to hear it?"

"I came to find out how bad it is," replied the literary man. "Eh! your
reverence?" he adds to his companion, a sharp-nosed man wi