ONE:John Gay, a contemporary of Pope, Swift, and Arbuthnot, is now best known by his "Fables" and his "Beggar's Opera." His "Fables" have been extremely popular, and still make him a general name; but, in his own time, his "Beggar's Opera" was his great success. Its wit, its charming music, its popular characters, gave it a universal favour; and it is the only English opera that even to this time has become permanent. Gay's "Trivia; or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London," is still amusing, and some of his ballads have a lightness and buoyancy about them which justify the esteem in which he was held.
TWO:I meanwhere is his own airplane?
ONE:Left arm extended! Turn that way! Larry murmured.The Lords Justices having met, appointed Joseph Addison, afterwards so celebrated as a writer, and even now very popular, as their secretary, and ordered all despatches addressed to Bolingbroke to be brought to him. This was an intimation that Bolingbroke would be dismissed; and that proud Minister, instead of giving orders, was obliged to receive them, and to wait at the door of the Council-chamber with his bags and papers. As the Lords Justices were apprehending that there might be some disturbances in Ireland, they were about to send over Sunderland as Lord-Lieutenant, and General Stanhope as Commander-in-Chief; but they were speedily relieved of their fears by the intelligence that all had passed off quietly there; that the Lords Justices of Ireland, the Archbishop of Armagh, and Sir Constantine Phipps, who had been more than suspected of Jacobitism, had proclaimed the king on the 6th of August, and, to give evidence of their new zeal, had issued a proclamation for disarming Papists and seizing their horses. The proclamation of George passed with the same quietness in Scotland, and no king, had he been born a native, in the quietest times, could have succeeded to the throne more smoothly. Eighteen lords, chiefly Whigs, were nominated by the new king to act as a Council of Regency, pending his arrival, and the Civil List was voted by Parliament.
TWO:183
ONE:Once when Felipa got out of the ambulance to tramp beside it, in the stinging snow whirls, and to start the thin blood in her veins, she had looked up into his blanket-swathed face, and laughed. "I wonder if you looked like that when you took me through this part of the world twenty years ago," she said.
TWO:All these causes of unpopularity were rendered more effective by the powerful political party which now assailed him. Pitt led the way, and the Dukes of Devonshire, Bolton, and Portland, the Marquis of Rockingham, the Earls of Temple, Cornwallis, Albemarle, Ashburton, Hardwicke, and Bessborough, Lords Spencer, Sondes, Grantham, and Villiers, James Grenville, Sir George Savile, and other Whigs, presented a formidable phalanx of opponents in both Houses. The measures, too, which he was obliged to bring forward, were certain to augment his discredit. The funded debt had grown to upwards of a hundred millions, and there were three millions and a half besides unfunded. It was necessary to raise a new loan, and, moreover, to raise a new tax, for the income was unequal to the expenditure, even in time of peace. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Dashwood, was not a man likely to make these new burdens go down easily. He issued the new loan to the public with so little advertisement, that the friends of the Ministers secured the greater part of the shares, and they soon rose to eleven per cent. premium, by which they were enabled, at the public cost, to make heavy sums. The tax which Sir Francis proposed was one on cider and perry, besides some additional duties on wines. There was at once an outcry in the City against this tax, led on by the Lord Mayor, Alderman Beckford, a great friend of Pitt. The cry was only too sure to find a loud echo from the cider-growing districts. Bute and his Chancellor were quickly compelled to reduce the proposed impost from ten shillings a hogshead, to be paid by the buyer, that is, by the merchant, to four shillings, to be paid by the grower. The tax thus cut down was calculated to produce only seventy-five thousand poundsa sum for which it was scarcely worth while to incur so much odium.The condition of Washington was inconceivably depressing. The time for the serving of the greater part of the troops was fast expiring; and numbers of them, despite the circumstances of the country, went off. Whilst Washington was, therefore, exerting himself to prevail on them to continue, he was compelled to weaken his persuasions by enforcing the strictest restraint on both soldiers and officers, who would plunder the inhabitants around them on the plea that they were Tories. Sickness was in his camp; and his suffering men, for want of hospitals, were obliged to lie about in barns, stables, sheds, and even under the fences and bushes. He wrote again to Congress in a condition of despair. He called on them to place their army on a permanent footing; to give the officers such pay as should enable them to live as gentlemen, and not as mean plunderers. He recommended that not only a good bounty should be given to every non-commissioned officer and soldier, but also the reward of a hundred or a hundred and fifty acres of land, a suit of clothes, and a blanket. Though Congress was loth to comply with these terms, it soon found that it must do so, or soldiers would go over to the royal army.
